Oh, so, I’ve made it to 200 posts. How terribly exciting!

If I could I would have asked if people wanted anything particularly special in this 200th, but I was already at 199 posts before I noticed. Ne’ermind.

I considered writing some things about myself: who I am, where I am, what I like, etc.; but I honestly couldn’t think of an interesting way to do this. I am pretty boring! Besides, I am not particularly comfortable with sharing that much with a big ol’ group of strangers.

In the end I’ve decided to do wrote a little about a few things that inspire and influence me, creatively. For the most part this is a list of books, and generally these are things that resonate most strongly with me when I’m writing. I have to emphasise that these are not necessarily my favourite books or films. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, is one of my all-time favourite authors, but his books exist in this little vacuum of perfection that I can’t even hope to emulate.

I am far more of a writer than I am a…I hesitate to say illustrator. Drawer? No, that’s silly. Cartoonist? That still conjures an air of professionalism. Amateur scribbler, perhaps. The point is that I stopped art lessons before I did my GCSEs, so I haven’t had an art lesson since I was 14. Ten years ago. On the other hand I’ve an English literature degree and am pretty damned good at Reading Stuff. In a practical sense this means I am far more aware of my shortcomings as a writer than I am as someone that scribbles pictures for fun. I’ve no qualms sharing said scribbles because, whilst I am trying to work out what I’m doing, I’m not fully aware of how good/bad a picture is.  

Right, so, this is how it is going to work. Over the next day or so I’ll do separate posts on some things that have influenced me. These will all be collated here, hopefully. If you’re on my tumblr itself, rather than the dash, you can also find the Influences link over on the left there.

Part two of the Influences posts, featuring @neilhimself and James Joyce.

So, where to begin? How about Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman? This wasn’t the first of his books I read - that honour belongs to Neverwhere. (I didn’t read any of his comics ‘til I’d finished all the available prose at the time.)

Smoke and Mirrors, as you may know, is a collection of short fictions and poems. I think it’s fair to say that I don’t enjoy every piece in the collection, but in a way that’s the point. The sheer variety of fiction on offer here is massively impressive. I was about to say that I could write forever about these stories, before remembering that I did once. My dissertation was entitled “‘Wonders and Illusions’: An Exploration of the Dialogue between Fantasy and Reality in the Short Stories of Neil Gaiman” and was, for the most part, focused on this collection and Fragile Things, with some other bits and bobs thrown in.

Whenever I think of Neil Gaiman I think of taking reality, and just shifting it a few degrees right or left, opening up a new world in the process. I try to avoid reading his books when I am writing though, as I too often unconsciously try to imitate him. 

That was longer than I intended, so I shall be briefer from hereon out.

Up next I am going to plump for James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I didn’t actually read this until I had to study it at university, but I came to love it pretty rapidly. I am aware how deeply pretentious this sounds, but Stephen Dedalus genuinely is a character that I find it very easy to empathise with. Occasionally when I tell people this I am met with horror. I am sorry if you hate Dedalus and if this reflects on me poorly, but I’m certain that everyone, to some small degree, wants to make something that’s…pure? Free? Or at the very least aspire to it.

The other influence posts. 

Part Three of my little run of influences.

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I haven’t a photograph of my copy, since a friend of mine is borrowing it, so I’ve had to Google image for one.  House of Leaves might be another pretentious oddity designed to flash to your friends so that they think you a little more “interesting” or intelligent than the average bear, but I don’t think so. For one thing it’s a very simple story, or three very simple stories, albeit told in a fairly unique way. It’s easy to focus too much on the odd layouts, and to be honest that’s probably why House of Leaves has made this list, as it was the first book of this kind that I encountered. However, it shouldn’t be ignore that the writing itself is very good, very meticulous, but also genuinely thrilling. You might pick up the book for its layout, but you finish it for the story.

I am an absolute sucker for detective television, from the glories of Poirot (particularly David Suchet’s interpretation of the character), through to Morse, The Wire, Wallander, and, at present, The Killing. If crime is afoot and there are people wanting to solve it, I am absolutely there. Curiously, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes (and, if he counts, Maurice LeBlanc’s Arsene Lupin) I very rarely read detective fiction. I don’t ever want to read any of Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories because, to me, Suchet is Poirot, and I don’t want the facts muddying the waters, thank-you-very-much.

I was scripting a comic that was very much inspired by the detective genre, largely based on television and film noirs such as The Maltese Falcon, but I’ve decided to turn it into a novel (aimed at younger teens). This change comes as a result of the realisation that, at least for now, I hate drawing comics. There’s a certain patience and consistency of style involved that just isn’t me. 

The House of Leaves image is from this blog.

The Poirot image is from this blog.

The other posts on my influences are here. 

Part 4 of the Influences and my last for today. There’ll be a couple of quick ones tomorrow. When we last left off I was jabbering about this comic I had written. Ahem.

Speaking of comics, I cannot ignore Hergé’s Tintin. This was one of the other major inspirations for the aforementioned comic that I was writing. From the tone to the panel layouts to the colouring, I really wanted something that summoned up the spirit of adventure and good-nature that punctuates Tintin. It’s had its blips. The very first book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is just anti-Communist propaganda, and makes for uncomfortable reading. (Although it’s worth looking at just for the moment when Tintin first acquires his trademark quiff, speeding away in a car). Hergé himself admitted that his early books suffered from a lack of research, and so too often fell back on stereotypes. These faults asides, the stories themselves are excellent, and there are so many writing/illustrating tricks to be learnt just glancing through any of the books.

Oh yeah, William Shakespeare. Look, you’ve probably already got an opinion on Shakespeare, so I am not going to bother. Although if you’re ever in Stratford and fancy seeing something at the RST, gimme a bell. 

The other influences posts are here.

Part five of my run on influences. You can find the first four here. 

The Romantics. Generally speaking I am going to lean more towards the second-generation poets, and in particular John Keats. Good grief did that man have a way with words; “Ode to a Nightingale” is probably in my top three poems ever. It may be in my top one poems. I can’t read “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” without thinking of his brother, Tom Keats, and it breaks my heart every damned time.

The Modernists, and in particular T. S. Eliot. In many ways this movement could be considered directly opposed to Romantic literature, but I can’t say I care much. It’s not like Eliot or Wordsworth much practiced what they preached in their approach to writing anyway. (Mind you, I’ve very little time for William Wordsworth anyway. Dorothy, on the other hand…). “Burnt Norton”, from Four Quartets, is probably in my top three poems.

Poetry is a little harder to explain as an inspiration. I don’t write poetry myself, but I think the ability to convey emotion in such a way that the reader feels it is incredibly important. Keats and Eliot were both astoundingly good at this.

The sixth and final part of my series on influences as a marker for my 200th post. I am not sure how many of you actually read any of it, but it’s nice to get this stuff out, you know? 

For the most part when you think of J.D. Salinger you think of The Catcher in the Rye, but in this case I’d like to touch on Franny and Zooey. The whole book is essentially comprised of three conversations and to me it’s a lesson on how to write extended dialogue without once leaving the reader feeling bored. You get a wonderful feel for the whole Glass family, their surroundings, and the titular characters in particular. There are other books that contain stories about the Glass family: Rise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction, and For Esmé – with Love and Squalor and Other Stories (I believe the latter is Nine Stories in the US) and I can highly recommend them all. Buddy Glass will certainly charm you.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I could have very easily swapped out any of the books here for, say, Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. I didn’t get to touch on any movies or music either. I may write a long post on film when I get to three or four hundred, but for now I think I’ll just remark that any film by Fellini, as well as any number of Sixties’ capers, are a constant source of inspiration to me.

Maybe at some point I’ll expand on films/music/randomstuffontheinternet/photographs etc., but this will do for now. 

All of the influences posts can be found here.

Great book…or the Greatest Book?