Copycat, Copycat: Writers on Copying Our Inspirations
It’s a common story. Writers get into writing because they’re inspired by certain authors who have influenced them. And, almost always, at first they emulate them in at least style, if not substance and theme.
But let’s move it from the general to specific and talk about YOU, writer.
Which author or authors were your beginning models to copy when you started? When did that copying start to shift into something that would grow into your own voice and style?
Ef Deal: My earliest influences were Bradbury and the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. Then Tolkien. The handwavium aspect of Bradbury is the basis of all steampunk, if you think about it, so yes that fantastic element is still in my works. But mostly I was influenced by my studies in French literature, where words were chosen for their greatest effect. Poe said all elements of a story should work together to create a unified effect, and that has been my guiding mantra.
Rob Cerio: Douglas Adams, Issac Azimov, and Clive Cussler. I think my style grew into its own after I stopped worrying about making jokes that sounded like “Bad Douglas Adams” Jokes, and just let them be funny on their own.
John L. Taylor: At the beginning, I was an imitator of Ray Bradbury and John Updike to a vast extent. All my work from that period was soundly rejected as it was a pale imitation of a superior author. I had tried to write a novel manuscript, but the early draft was a meandering pile of exposition. Note I hadn’t tried writing horror or New Pulp yet despite being a major fan of the genres. I began developing a voice of my own, oddly, while writing erotica under a pen name for a now defunct website (Ironically, those unpaid stories are still my most widely read at 6k or more reads). I somehow connected with an audience by writing the type of story I wanted to read. My voice in writing finally emerged while writing The Rocket Molly Syndicate for the Dieselpunk E-Pulp Showcase Vol.2 in 2013-14. My Mom was fighting ovarian cancer as I was working on it, half was written in hospital waiting rooms. I needed a release and wrote pure escapist fiction. It connected, and the anthology it appeared in moved about 775 copies across all platforms and was adapted as an audio drama for the Coffee Contrails Podcast, adding another 200 or so downloads. It is still my most successful work to date. I dug further into New Pulp, but with a strong influence from Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. My next works were The Legend of the Wild Man, a 100 line narrative poem that ran in the Mythic Circle, and The Thing in the Wexler House, an audio narration that Otis Jiry performed for me on his YouTube channel. Both got solid receptions. As I branched into poetry, more growth happened, and My current style was cemented. Eerie, dreamlike narratives with a pulp twist. Also, writing online narrations helped a lot, as I was introduced to horror voices different from what I’d read before. Variety helps a lot.
Anna Grace Carpenter: The first I remember trying to imitate was Cordwainer Smith. He had a flair for not letting story get in the way of the occasional stylistic flourish and I loved it. Later Tad Williams and Raymond E. Feist made an impact on how I used characters to best tell the “exciting” parts in ways that actually had an emotional impact, plus a particular style of world-building that has stuck with me. (I would be hard-pressed to explain this, but I know that it’s there because of reading their work.)
Things started to be less copycat once I really started writing a lot. The more I was using words in storytelling regularly, the more my own style began to emerge from the way I pictured certain scenes and the dialog I heard from my characters. At which point those authors moved from a category of imitation to one of influence.
HC Playa: Which author or authors were your beginning models to copy when you started? When did that copying start to shift into something that would grow into your own voice and style?
So there are 4 authors that spurred me into writing: Sherrilyn McQueen, J.R. Ward, Karen Marie Moning, and Patricia Potter.
All four build intricate worlds, whether it’s dropping you into the romantic lives of people in 1100 AD Scotland, a hidden Vampire society, a murder investigation turned apocalyptic collision of Fae realms and human, or weaving mythology into romance and adventure.
I didn’t copy any of them directly, but they all made characters breathe on the page. They weren’t afraid to weave love into blood and gore and battles. One of my favorite things that I did copy was the reoccurring cast that doesn’t necessarily feature the same POV from book to book.
Read the full article:
https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/copycat-copycat-writers-on-copying-our.html
