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Thursday, December 06, 2012

Influences

When I was seeking blog topics, someone asked what movies, songs or books have influenced my writing. This is actually a fairly difficult question, although at a macro level, it's not bad. I know I have a deep love of action movies like The Terminator, Die Hard, Speed or The Mummy. In fact, Speed is probably my favorite romance movie ever. Yes, I know. It does need a little more romance, but I love it. Movies like Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail leave me bored to tears.

So my love of action movies has no doubt influenced the fact that I prefer to write action/adventure romance. Actually, these are my favorite kinds of books to read, too. Occasionally, I'll read something that isn't filled with suspense, but that's rare unless it's nonfiction.

Also, I think it's a pretty sure bet that I can blame my childhood fascination with reruns of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched for why I love my Gineal world with my magical troubleshooters. (In the Midnight Hour; In Twilight's Shadow; Edge of Dawn; and In the Darkest Night.) I always wanted to wiggle my nose like Samantha or blink like Jeannie and make things so. Fiction is the closest I'll ever get to that.

I'm not sure books have really influenced me, although I think I internalized story structure and pacing from all the reading I've done. I used to read a book a day so I've done an awful lot of reading. Maybe this counts as an indirect influence?

Music, well, I'm not sure that's influenced me at all. Oh, after the fact, or while I'm writing sometimes a piece of music will strike me as especially appropriate to the book I'm writing. It's how I've ended up with theme songs for my stories. It was totally an accident. IPod shuffled to Devo's Girl U Want while I was writing Ravyn's Flight and I was like, whoa, that fits this story perfectly. When I hear a song that fits the book rather than one I picked just to have something, the characters from that book return and hang out for a short bit. It's pretty cool.

As far as directly influencing at a micro level, I can't think of any examples. Things go weird sometimes, though. As an example, I'd never seen more than a few minutes of Predator, so it surprised me after Ravyn's Flight came out when people said I'd used something from that movie. Um, no, I didn't. Sure, I hit the movie when I was flipping through the channels, but as soon as I identified it, I moved to another channel because I had no interest in watching it.

I have no idea if anything like this has happened again because no one has said anything and I'm notoriously bad about watching films. I tried when I had Netflix, but movies would sit on my entertainment center for months and I'd end up sending it back unwatched far too many times.

Usually, when I write, the characters just tell me stuff and I write it down. Who knows where they're getting it from?