Where did this come from?
I recently read a post from novelist Cari Luna about her experience of taking an online class from Kathryn Davis based on Davis’s theory that “the first book a writer loves as a child will appear in some form in everything that person writes for the rest of their lives.” Luna’s response to that theory, and her experience of taking that class, are thoughtful and interesting and worth reading.
Reading her essay made me think about the idea of influences generally. I admit that I tend to have a bit of a raised brow when readers or critics speculate on the influences that went into a piece (full disclosure, this has its foundations in a review of one of my first short stories, that spent most of the discussion talking about how similar the critic thought the story was to a movie that had recently come out – a movie that I have never seen.) We can speculate all we want, but we very often can’t know.
I think that’s true for our own work, as well as that of others. Sometimes yes – we know we wrote that story as a response to that thing we read. The Grey King wasn’t the first book I loved as a child, but it was an early beloved book that has remained so, and I can very much see its influences on my life and writing – it was where I first became interested in the Arthurian mythos in a way that was more than just liking parts of the story, but rather in wanting to track down and learn more about parts of the story. And the idea of pulling those characters out of time, even into our own time, is very much something that has stuck with me.
I also know the sensation of reading back through the draft of a longer project and thinking “oh, yes, I must have been watching Show X at the time, as everyone is talking like they’re a character on it – I need to fix that” or of seeing phrasings and cadences that remind me of who I was reading when I was writing a particular bit. Influences, yes, if we define the term generously, but not cultivated ones, and not ones I tend to allow to remain past discovering them in the draft.
There are influences we recognize and cultivate deliberately, and influences that just seem to be in the creative ether – that thing that happens when suddenly everyone has a vampire book out, or when Gothic novels have a resurgence, or when a literary magazine realizes that a shocking number of its initial stories have bees in. Who knows why, it just happens sometimes.
I realize this might sound flippant, and I am not trying to dismiss the idea of influences. I know that there are pieces of my life and pieces of other people’s works that go into what I write, and how I write it. In particular when I am writing a longer project, I collect these influences and interests deliberately, magpie-like, until I have a nest of them that’s large enough to support the story.
But I also think, that, like most things, and maybe creative things in particular, tracing an influence is not as easy as a one-to-one connection. That even when we see, know, acknowledge the link, it’s still transformed by our interaction with it. That there will still be things we didn’t know we were doing in our work, and there will be things that our readers will see differently because their influences are not the same as ours. I think it’s useful to consider where we can from, but perhaps more important to consider where we want to go.