Influences, schminfluences

Do the books you are reading leave their footprints on your works in progress? When you write, do you sometimes look back over the last few paragraphs or chapters and think, “Gee…that sounds sort of familiar…” and then realize you just rewrote a scene from your current favorite read? And your characters are now helping themselves to some other author’s plot?

OK…maybe I’m the only one.

But seriously, when I go from reading the last book in the Song of Ice and Fire -- Game of Thrones series, then crack open my middle grade fantasy WIP – and see bits and pieces of my own little game of thrones going on, it makes me pause.

First of all, don’t get me wrong. My 12 year old characters are not lopping off each other’s heads or marrying their own cousins, hatching baby dragons or even shape-shifting into huge, wild wolves when they dream. (Forgive me, George R. R. Martin! But I’m not really stealing your stories!!) There is, however, an element of a tug-of-war over a throne, cousins vying for the King’s attention, eccentric characters and even a dragon coming to life in my manuscript.

So after editing 40 pages last night, I stopped with fingers poised over the keyboard and said, “Oho!”

OK…I didn’t say it out loud. But I thought it – loudly – so that should count for something.
            “Oho!,” I thought. “THIS might be why there are only so many plots in the world! Writers steal from each other. And I bet everybody knew this but me!”

(Oh, come on. You totally have moments where you talk to yourself like that. I know you do. Just admit it.)

“West Side Story really IS Romeo and Juliet rewritten!” I mused.

My thoughts continued to meander, eventually focusing again on my own characters, their story and their world. But I suddenly felt like I had a better grasp on why they were doing some of the things they were doing…why I had written parts of the story a certain way and what I should think about changing, expanding, and deleting as I was editing.

What novels have inspired you? What influences can you trace in your own writing? Poets? Essayists? Novelists? Playwrights? Do you see Shakespeare’s plots or a shimmer of Emerson’s words in your pieces? Maybe Stephen King’s tension or characters that remind you of someone from a Norah Ephron screenplay?

So maybe my MG novel will be the Game of Thrones for the elementary school set.

HBO, here I come!!