Inspiration from the Past

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Most writers know the most dreaded question readers have for us: where do your ideas come from?

I guess none of us enjoy getting that question because it’s hard to give a basic answer to the basic question. Where do our ideas come from?  Everywhere. Fragments of conversations, traits from people we know, news stories we read online, past experiences.

But a similar question and one I’m much more enthusiastic about answering is what books and authors have influenced you? 

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that my answer has changed over the years and I was curious if yours had.

I’ve always (and correctly) mentioned mystery writers M.C. Beaton, Agatha Christie, and the writers who were Carolyn Keene as influences who made me want to write mysteries. Plus, their traditional approaches (finding clues, chasing red herrings, speaking with suspects) created a story structure I follow when writing my own stories.

Lately, however, I’ve paid a lot more attention to other aspects of my mysteries, especially the friendships.  I’ve realized how much my writing owes to Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad are Friends, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and even Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.  These are all friendship stories. Friends who get along, friends who quarrel, friends who learn how to continue friendships even in tough times. This was something that hadn’t even occurred to me until the last few years and once it did, I was amazed how much these childhood books had influenced my writing.

Writer Christopher Shultz wrote an interesting post, “Cataloging Your Influences.” He took it a step further by doing an exercise where he went down each letter of the alphabet and considered an influence starting with that letter.  He found it useful because:

“…knowing where I came from gives me a keener sense of my own “voice”—that all-too-important thing every writer is supposed to find. Neil Gaiman sums up the relationship between influences and voice-finding perfectly in his “Make Good Art” speech:”

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.

This resonated with me.  Plus, I think it helped me understand exactly what flavors my writing and, maybe, gave me ideas for improving it.

I love to hear what other writers’ influences are…I know often they’re not books but music, films, or other media.  What are some of your influences?  Has your answer to this question changed over the years, as mine has?