[Dragaera] Authorial Influences

[Michele Riccio via Dragaera]

Scott - as for your conclusion, I'm not sure all writer's voices aren't a composite of authors they admire blended with the writer's own imagination.

Humorous beats especially.

We write what we 'know' - ie, we know how others have created stories so we do what they did. We pick up sentence structure like a child picks up an accent. We envision scenarios based on what movies/books we've consumed - but memory is a weird thing and what I garner from a book/author will be different from what stands out for you (mostly) - so the mix remains unique.

Did you read "The Sun the Moon and the Stars" by Brust? It's about a bunch of artists and how they create. Also, there is a Hungarian folktale tucked in. Anyway - there is a scene where they discuss another artist's style 'creeping into' their own. You aren't alone in thinking about how one's writing is influenced.


I wouldn't worry about plagiarism - there was no blatant copying  (sounds like an interesting story though)

Michele Riccio

--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 1/12/17, Scott Schultz via Dragaera <dragaera at lists.dragaera.info> wrote:

 Subject: [Dragaera] Authorial Influences
 To: "'Dragaera List'" <dragaera at dragaera.info>
 Date: Thursday, January 12, 2017, 11:36 AM
 
 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.
 
 
 
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