[Dragaera] Authorial Influences

[Scott Schultz via Dragaera]

For various reasons, I got inspired yesterday to write a fanfic around a
game I play a lot. The particular scenario involves a three-way gang war,
and a confrontation/negotiation between representatives of two of the
factions.

After I finished the first writing spell on it, I read the last thing I
wrote and then almost laughed out loud.

Here's what I wrote:

----
"Now, Drixxie, it would be discourteous to drop in unannounced and kill your
hosts. We just. disabled them a little."

She paused as if thinking for a moment, then shrugged.

"Some of them took more 'disabling' than others."

Drixx made a mental note to double the current month's infirmary budget and
to raise the pay of anybody who had managed to rate some extra "disabling".
----

That last sentence made me laugh on re-reading it because I realized I was
writing in "Vlad's voice". That was the exactly the kind of thing Steve
would have written for Vlad. "Sticks is alive? Double his pay." In fact, I'm
going to bet that he wrote that sort of thing more than once in the stories
where Vlad is having territorial problems with his neighbors.

It's just a throwaway fanfic so I'm not going to worry about whether I'm
really "plagiarizing" Steve. I just thought it was interesting that when you
have a favorite author  whose stories you've read many times,  that his or
her "voice" can start to flow effortlessly out of your fingers as easily as
your own.

I suppose that professional authors, who are invariably voracious readers as
well, have to deal daily with the issue of writing in their own unique
"voice" without it being simply a composite of all of the "voices" they've
collected from years of being a consumer of fiction.