Influence and Inspiration (Where-You-Get-Your-Ideas)

I started this blog with an image from a Grant Morrison comic, so it's fitting I end it with another. This one is Flex Mentallo, part history of superheroes, part autobiography, all metafictional madness. The answer to the world-ending calamity rests in the main character's imagination, that the greatest power of all (greater even than the atomic bomb) lies within our minds - the ability to create the strongest idea. Morrison argues that idea is the superhero.

Albert Camus claimed that a man's work is a journey to discover "those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened". For me, one of those images is of a man in a red cape walking on the air. I adored Superman as a child, how strong and noble he was. At 16, I read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons; its fleshed-out characters and playful use of the medium have inspired me more than any piece of literature, leading me to discover other modernist works like Ulysses and Cloud Atlas.

Like John Cheever and the suburbs, I somehow keep coming back to the superhero. Beyond their purpose as an aspirational figure (superheroes being the best traits of humanity magnified tenfold), they introduced me to science fiction, fantasy, and mythology; a gateway to other realms of fiction. That, I think, is one of the great and simple images, the one just below: Where-You-Get-Your-Ideas. I'm looking forward to finding out what my other two are.

The Author Enters Into His Own Death

Whenever one reviews a performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, it's de rigeur to talk about how he completely disappears into his role, and how he is John Proctor/Daniel Plainview/Abraham Lincoln. I can't help but feel this should apply not just to all actors, but to authors as well. Acting started in Ancient Greece with the performers donning masks - the actor was invisible, the mask was all that mattered. This should also be true of writers.

There's no way for an author to remain completely invisible; in this day and age, the author must make themselves a brand. Brian Eno perfected this in the late 90s, and even the lack of an image can become an image, e.g. Thomas Pynchon, or Daft Punk and their iconic robot costumes. All creators have their own style and idiosyncrasies as well - Emily Dickinson couldn't completely divorce her preoccupation with religion and death from her poetry, after all. Instead, I prefer to see the author as a midwife; they bring the work into the world, maybe even name it, but otherwise have on influence over it. Once a work is published, the author's role is done; they must now let their baby face the world.

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively... this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. - Roland Barthes

You Belong to the Course

(Week 4 saw us looking at the language of modern warfare and applying it to a piece of work in a similar vein to Emily Dickinson. What follows is probably radically different to what everyone else came up with. Probably best read out in Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's voice. Or, failing that, Tom Waits's voice as heard on "Hell Broke Luce".)

The first big deployment
Hold your head up high son
All the folks back home
Are rootin' for ya
Come in and join the Course
You'll have the best time
Working hard and playing hard
With all the troops all the boys and girls
But I'll let you in on a secret son
That guy to your left he won't be coming back
He won't make the grade
He'll get downed by friendly fire
Or maybe he'll step on an IED
(Which is his own fault, he should attended
(Those debriefings on IEDs
(There were plenty of opportunities to do so)
Either way he goes back home in a box
His dreams blow to ash
And he'll be lucky to have a pot to piss in
Sad fact of life son
The Course don't care where you come from
Or how many friends you got back home
The Course is your mama and your papa
And the Course got no time for the dull
You are always fightin' someone faster and smarter
Could be a hostile
Could be a drone
But if you can't keep up
Well then the Course got no use for ya
And even if you make it through walkin' and talkin'
You can't ever go back to Kansas
The outside world'll prob'ly have no use for ya
You belong to the Course
Oh yes you are part of the Course

Between the Tower and the Machine

Author John Green considers fictional writing inherently political because "people—even imaginary ones—do not live in vacuums", and this has some truth to it. It's impossible to write without being affected by external forces, especially since politics is, well, everything. The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek "politēs", meaning "citizen". It affects all of us. Emily Dickinson's poetry, consciously or otherwise, is obviously coloured by the events of the Civil War.

However, I don't think it's the writer's automatic duty to make their work have a strong social or political thrust. They can carry that particular flag if they want to, but it shouldn't get in the way of a writer's true duty - making good art. A good novel/play/film with added sociopolitical subtext is a welcome touch of cinnamon on a delicious cake. A ranting sociopolitical screed that resembles a novel/play/film if you squint at it? That's like eating a giant lump of cinnamon that just happens to look like a cake, and would be just as much fun to consume.

To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. - George Orwell

The Pen He Writes With

In his introduction to the Collected Cheever, Hanif Kureishi talks about John Cheever's work in relation to his influences: they're Chekhovian, since Cheever could also "captur(e) significant moments in ordinary lives with humorous comparison and without condescension, and...write a breathtaking elegiac last paragraph that both encompasses and transcends the story", as well as taking from Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Kureishi's novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, in turn takes after Cheever, being set in the suburbs (South London rather than the South Shore) and dealing with sexuality.

It seems to me, then, that a writer's style is like a tree; cut it down, and you can see all the influencing factors like rings on the stump. My own voice has a similar form of ancestry. Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Douglas Adams taught me to stop being a miserable git and notice the beauty in the world. From Alan Moore, David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino comes a fondness for wordplay and dialogue. My love of sarcasm with a note of burning righteousness can be traced back to Warren Ellis by way of Hunter S. Thompson.

And, much like how no two trees or two people are the same, however similar styles may be, no two authorial voices are the same either.

Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. - Henry David Thoreau

Doll

I begin as a doll, blank, mannequin, simulacrum. I look like everyone else only from a distance. I want to be more, but I don't quite know how. Soon I find a master, and I think I become more than a doll. I dress like my master, move like my master, even talk, laugh and sing like my master; for I can do such a pretty imitation of my master's voice. I take what makes my master powerful, what gives them form, and imbibe it into myself. But for all my effort, nothing has changed, but now I know no way out. I am still only a doll.

Shame the Devil

Let's get this nice and sparkling clear - "truth" and "realism" are not the same thing. Once something becomes fiction, it ceases to be reality; it's a projection of reality, filtered through a certain viewpoint. Even the grittiest, most nihilistically depressing crime drama from Arse-on-Trent has to obey the rules of drama, so a writer shouldn't bother trying to capture reality. What they should be seeking instead is truth, which is quite different.

There's a reason why people stick with fantasy (and I don't just mean elves and dwarves) beyond the need for mere escapism; good fantasy has good characters. Characters you can relate to, admire, sympathise with, or just love to hate. The Greeks understood this - their gods and heroes had very human desires and flaws, often tragically so. Marvel's particular brand of superheroes with feet of clay caught on with the public for this very reason.

Truth is what people search for. Fiction is a confusing world to navigate, so you need a character to play Virgil to the reader's Dante and guide them through this strange land. You need to ingrain them with that spark of life that makes them ring true for the reader. Doesn't matter what sort of character you're writing; they don't even need to be real. Just appear real.

Tell truth and shame the devil.

If thou have the power to raise him, bring him hither,

And I'll be sworn to have power to shame him hence.

- William Shakespeare.