The Ultimate Superheroines Forum

Simply put, which other writers have inspired you? Are there particular authors whom you try to emulate, or who you've found have influenced your style in some way even without your having noticed?

In my case, I've found that I've been influenced a lot by Frank Herbert: the heavy use of internal monologue; the stylised, supra-real style of writing dialogue, and the arch, circumspect distance of the narration. It's not something I've deliberately tried to imitate, but I think I have, to greater or lesser extents, ended up trying to pull of that kind of style.

The writers on 2000AD in the 70s. Too many to name but they all bought into the concept of good stories illustrated by superb artwork. I learned more from reading 2000AD than I ever learned in school. Particularly the potency that an ending can pack, especially when you let the reader work it out for themselves rather than the writer spelling it out to them. (superbly illustrated in the Future Shocks short stories in the comic and by Allan Moore's legendary 'The Killing Joke")
Learned certain things from certain others to a limited degree, fight scenes from Bernard Cornwell, descriptive detail from Stephen King (also learned the value of pace to a story indirectly from King as even his good stuff can be too bloody slow as to be tedious) suspense from James Herbert. I don't pretend to be as good as any of them but there it is.

I've confessed before but will do so again that I don't read enough. My main influences are through music and television. Movie music can be very inspirational and give me ideas about set piece moments, about movement and the sentiment within a scene. I know composers try to lift a scene with music to hammer home what the moment is about but for me that music can also help me visualise an unseen story which I can make my own.

We live in a time of some awesome TV shows, there really are some solid ideas out there and they can be an inspiration to me. One show that I really wanted to emulate was "The Killing", a police procedural show. The thing I liked about it was that near the end of each episode (a season was about a single murder case) you'd discover some key fact during the investigation. I loved the sense of that discovery, especially as the end credit music began to fade in and you knew that the moment was coming. It was something I really would want to instill in my readers from time to time as I revealed to them something about a character or plot element in a story at a chapter's end. To be able to do that, chapter after chapter? I would be really happy if I was able to craft something like that.

I'd say for me, definitely, it would have to be The Flintstones. That combination of historical fiction combined with clever, modern day sensibilities creates such a wealth of possibilities to pursue. Plus, who could argue with the brilliance of Bamm-Bamm! Using pre-adolescent angst as a metaphor for violent expression against society's injustice? That's just next level genius. Yup, definitely The Flintstones.

Bert wrote: ↑

3 years ago

I'd say for me, definitely, it would have to be The Flintstones. That combination of historical fiction combined with clever, modern day sensibilities creates such a wealth of possibilities to pursue. Plus, who could argue with the brilliance of Bamm-Bamm! Using pre-adolescent angst as a metaphor for violent expression against society's injustice? That's just next level genius. Yup, definitely The Flintstones.

Do I sense a hint of mocking sarcasm, perhaps?

Partly, but I'm also taking the piss out of myself. Among the writerly set here I am a bit of a hacksaw among scalpels. Mostly I was just trying to be funny.

Noir writers like Chandler, Hammet, Spillain inspired me. Their femme fatalles were the bad girls, so my stories are almost gender flips of theirs. The good guy always ends up getting taken at some point, bad girl falls for wrong guy, tragedy results.

Now the seriously guilty admission; really bad, I mean really bad paperback bodice rippers (stuff Harlequin wouldn't publish) and the male equivalent (John Norman novels and the whole women's prison genre). The dialogue is bad, the plots are worse, and my fingers are already under my bra just remembering them.

Valleyvixin wrote: ↑

3 years ago

Noir writers like Chandler, Hammet, Spillain inspired me. Their femme fatalles were the bad girls, so my stories are almost gender flips of theirs. The good guy always ends up getting taken at some point, bad girl falls for wrong guy, tragedy results.

Now the seriously guilty admission; really bad, I mean really bad paperback bodice rippers (stuff Harlequin wouldn't publish) and the male equivalent (John Norman novels and the whole women's prison genre). The dialogue is bad, the plots are worse, and my fingers are already under my bra just remembering them.

Stuff Harlequin WOULDN'T publish? Good lord!

I'm a fairly eclectic reader and as such tend to pull from a wide variety of sources. At times I am more heavily influenced by certain writers and will occasionally mimic his or her style for a time until I shake myself out of that. I used to be a reader and writer of poetry and although the economy of words isn't my strong suit, the use of specific visualization of moments does present itself in my work.

As for specific writers, a bit of Raymond Chandler sneaks in, some King, Koontz and Kingsolver. What's more, honestly, I'm a big fan of all things comic, I take my humor from Monty Python, standup comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and the comic timing that I inject into my dialogue when I find an amusing situation present itself.

Hello Damselbinder

Up to now I have endeavored to write in the g rated world and Charles Dickens is my writing tutor. What this means is I must read aloud for one hour from one of his novels before I sit to write.

This helps me at times to create strange names such as:
Ficklefackledornrimplewiler in inspiration to certain names
Dickens created such as Mr. Pecksniff.

In your writing, do you have g rated authors such as Dickens
or Mark Twain who have influenced your writing?
Thank you
CrouchingTiger

crouchingtiger1950 wrote: ↑

3 years ago

Hello Damselbinder

Up to now I have endeavored to write in the g rated world and Charles Dickens is my writing tutor. What this means is I must read aloud for one hour from one of his novels before I sit to write.

This helps me at times to create strange names such as:
Ficklefackledornrimplewiler in inspiration to certain names
Dickens created such as Mr. Pecksniff.

In your writing, do you have g rated authors such as Dickens
or Mark Twain who have influenced your writing?
Thank you
CrouchingTiger

Hi, CT.

Dickens is certainly a hell of a fellow. Though I note that his elaborate names tended to have some kind of poetry to them, like Bleak House's Lady Deadlock, or were even just directly on the nose jokes (as in the case of Mr M'Choakumchild), rather than being random, funny strings of syllables.

I've already talked about how I've been influenced by Frank Herbert a bit. I might be tempted to cite Roger Zelazny as something of an influence. I was surprised how much Lord of Light, for example, read like superhero fiction.

Michael Crichton was a big one for me growing up. I always loved his blend of fiction with believable science. My one attempt at writting a huge fantasy epic actually involved a huge degree of work tying most of the magic and mystical things left over by a long dead civilization which basically amounted to ordinary technology which the majority of the characters just didn't understand. They had like, 'rail gun' crossbows utilizing magnetism, there were elevators in the mage towers that basically just ran off electricity in a roundabout way. The main villain was a psychotic robot that was left to rot on the planet when the 'ancient civilization' had vacated in spaceships etc.

For general fiction: I've soaked up influences from a longer list of writers I admire than I could possibly name. Everything from Tolkien to LeGuin, Charles Saunders to Octavia Butler, Stephen King to Samuel L. Delany, Umberto Eco to Gene Wolfe to Marion Zimmer Bradley to C.J. Cherryh to Maureen McHugh to (more recently) N.K Jemisin (The City We Became is fucking rad, BTW) and Nnedi Okorafor and so many more. They're all there in the stew somewhere, the deficiencies my own.

For this kind of writing: I credit my particular set of kinks to the romance genre. Jean Auel and in particular Johanna Lindsey's Secret Fire, an infamous novel with a scathingly hot not-really-consensual sex scene in it that stayed embedded in my lizard brain for a long time. Found them on my prim-and-proper Mum's bookshelf, is the irony, you can get away with astonishing shit in the romance genre as it turns out. Discovered superheroine kink later on and it's really kind of a sub-kink for me, interesting and fun but not 100% necessary. Most of my other inspiration for this kind of writing comes from either down-and-dirty pulp fiction written under the pen name Anonymous or that might as well have been, or to BDSM fiction like The Story of O., or from visual media (mainstream movies and shows to porn parodies or just straight-up porn, or effectively softcore pornographic scenes from otherwise "mainstream" movies).

Jimmy Buffett summed up my influences this way, "I have read dozens of books about heroes and crooks and learn much from both of their styles." I have such a wide range it is hard to pin down favorites. I have always been an avid fan of Sir Author Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Ellery Queen, and Warren Murphy's Destroyer series, just to name a few. I also have an affinity for Alfred Hitchcock's work. I am also a huge fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

You can probably surmise from my list of influences I enjoy placing my heroine's in traps that they can rarely see coming until it is too late.

I read and have read a lot from Heinlein to Hardy. Also more comic books than anyone would acknowledge before Comic-Con took over Hollywood. I loved DC 'cause I could read a whole comic book story over breakfast. (That's why my comics were never collectibles.) I avoided Marvel because of their multipart stories that they insisted on finishing in a different book than they started in. Comic book store? That was some other 12-year-old entrepreneur's total fantasy. I had to rely on the drug store. My current favorites are the Hornblower and Jack Reacher ouvres. My first published story however was a pale imitation of Ray Bradbury's style. After that I mostly went my own way unless I wanted to do a funny pastiche of the hard-boiled detective.

As to my pornography inspirations to write, they came mostly from the early, wild internet days. I still occasionally re-read Vladi Wizard's classic Unmasking Batgirl.

Fantasy writers such as George R Martin and Sapowski have been an inspiration as of late. Also erotica writers such as Anais Nin.

I remember find the Perils of Batgirl II on line in the 1990s, when it was originally being posted. I was like, holy fuck! This is what bondage porn should be. Just a repetitive series situations that get heroine tied up and orgasming repeatedly as her doom creeps nearer… with a gloating villain or villainess get themselves off as part of the game.

A story as old as time itself, a girl, a vengeful lesbian sadist and a needless slow industrial press….