Fanfiction -- No Longer a Dirty Word in Fiction?

For this week's roundtable, let's talk about fan fiction. For a long time, it was synonymous with both "amateur" by professionals and "theft" by IP owners. But that has seemed to be changing as time moves on. So, this one is for all the fan-fic writers out there. Let's chat.

What is your experience with fan-fic?

Angelia Sparrow: I got into pro writing from fanfic. I have done a few filed off pieces (took an old Star Wars fiction, made Luke a girl and Han a cat-girl, kept the plot, changed the end)

Kay Iscah: I've written four or five fanfiction novels, including a perspective trilogy (same story from 3 different limited perspectives), a novella, and some short pieces. But I'm careful to separate it under a different pen name from my professional work, and think it's important to respect the copy right holder's wishes when it comes to writing fanfiction. I've also edited or beta read stories for others.

Ed Erdelac: I started out writing Star Wars fanfic and was eventually hired to write the real thing a couple of times. My last novel was a thinly disguised Friday The 13th fanfic. 

Bobby Nash: I started out writing the characters I knew and loved. That helped me learn the basics of writing and eventually it led to creating my own characters and telling their stories.

Jana Oliver: My first few stories were fan-fic though I never uploaded those so no one else has read them. All three were book length (a Dr Who and 2 Babylon 5s). My fan-fic proved I could handle plotting and the story structure, and so I started writing books set in my own worlds.

I do not read fan-fic, especially anything based on my main UF series due to the legal implications. I just ignore that those exist, though I was kinda jazzed when they first appeared.

Danielle Procter Piper: The most valuable thing I've learned in writing fanfiction is that another writer is going to jump you and nitpick your work, telling you how you're not following the original ideas to the letter. It's fanfiction. I can do what I want. 

Susan Roddey: Oh, do I have thoughts on this... Let me preface this by saying fanfiction writers are absolutely lifting IP from the creators. That's just the way of the craft. HOWEVER... I cut my writing teeth on fan fiction. Granted, most of it is terrible and will never, ever see the light of day beyond what used to exist on Livejournal and in old Yahoo! Groups, but it helped me learn how to write. When the rules of the world are pre-defined, it's easier to focus on technique - dialogue, plot, characterization, etc. I took what I learned playing in others' sandboxes and used it to create my own original work.

Nope, wrong kind of fan.

Jason Bullock: I have had a little experience with fan fiction of owned IP. I have written several novellas and short stories of public domain characters. My family has written several works of fan-fic of sci-fi television series however. I have read several fan-fic series including sci-fi from movies and television for entertainment as well as creative inspiration.

Maya Preisler: I’ve been writing fanfic for about thirty years, though it’s only recently that I’ve started “publishing” stories on AO3 for others to read. My most popular work is an ongoing epic series that currently has around 263k words and around 16k page views.

Bertram Gibbs: For several years, on top of my original stories, I was given the chance to write a few DC Comic stories for this online fan fiction group. My first was a tribute to the 80s Justice League series (‘The Return of BWAH-HAH-HA’) where Plastic Man, Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) Booster Gold (with Skeets) take on Lex Luthor using their combined powers of annoyance. That was because DC didn’t want to publish the novel (rubes). It was so well received, I was invited to write a few more (a time travel Batman story and a JSA piece). And if invited here, I’ll be more than happy to share them with you.

What are the pros of writing fan-fic that you've experienced?

Maya Preisler: First and foremost, fan fiction has become a form of self-care for me; it allows me to escape to another galaxy and process my thoughts and feelings through fictional characters. Fan fiction has brought me several friendships, including meeting one of my readers at DragonCon. Having a community of readers who value and support my writing encourages me to persist and continue long past when I would normally have abandoned a story. I also cannot overemphasize how good it feels as a writer to wake up to comments, kudos, and other notifications. Receiving positive feedback is also an excellent dopamine boost.

Additionally, writing fan-fic assists me in growing and developing my skills. As someone who often gets mired down in the details while writing, fan-fic empowers me to practice by skipping the steps (like naming characters) which would normally cause roadblocks for me. This allows me to focus on the details of my writing such as foreshadowing, grammar, word use, dialogue, descriptions, and even story flow. After two years of consistent fan-fic practice, I can see already see where my writing has improved.

Susan Roddey: I think the pros are very much what I mentioned above -- it's a sandbox. You don't have to worry about keeping the details of the world straight because those who would read your work in that world are already familiar with the rules. It takes a large part of the stress of writing off the table so it becomes easy to pick the skill you want to develop and practice. I learned character voice by emulating well-known characters. I learned how to build a plot by fixing the things I saw wrong in the properties I love. It also gives writers a sort of neutral ground to play with gender identity and sexual orientation because again, the rules are set but can be manipulated so long as you keep the changes within the confines of the character's predefined personality. It does also create a sense of community - a place where people can belong. It's a fantastic arena for outcasts because we can find common ground among other outcasts. For the most part, it's a very accepting and loving community. I met nearly all of my friends as a result of fanfic communities.

Danielle Procter Piper: The benefits of fanfiction are that it's good practice writing, immediate feedback, and can help establish you as an author worth following.

Bertram Gibbs: It’s refreshing to write stories that I feel have yet to have been explored in the comics and enhance known characters. As a writer, there’s always that ‘what if’ moment where an interesting story comes from your soul and you hope that the writers of the stories you hold dear will share that thought. And when they don’t, you know that it’s up to you to put those thoughts to paper (or computer), to experiment with the beloved characters physically and/or emotionally, and create unexplored twists.

Kay Iscah: I think fan-fic can be a good training ground for writers. It's functionally not much different than franchise writing, except you have fewer rules to follow and no hope of a paycheck. Using another writer's characters well involves study of those characters and building a deep knowledge of their world. Fan fiction writing at it's best is a pure love of the characters and the craft of writing. It's writing for joy and not profit, a modern version of retelling stories around a campfire.

Jason Bullock: I have found inspiration creatively with fan-fic. I have written several fan-fiction stories in scripts for fan comics, including Star Trek Next Generation, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, X-FILES, and Murdoch Mysteries. I found writing those particular IPs gave me the challenge to put myself into the experiences of exotic universies helps me stretch my range. Meek characters, hubris-ridden oligarchs, otherworldly interloper, all were subject to me writing them in inside their own skin. How would they act? How would they talk? Why would they react to situations they would be placed in? These are a few of questions that I would need to familiarize myself with about the characters I was writing.

Bobby Nash: It’s good practice. It’s a fun hobby. You can polish your writing and maybe translate that into getting a professional writing gig.

What are the cons of writing fan-fic that you've experienced?

Kay Iscah: At it's worst, it's amateur porn, exploiting characters for name recognition.

And that's really the worst part of fanfiction. It's often thoughts without filter, which is one thing for your diary and another when sharing it with other people. Particularly for sexual titillation. My worst experience was being in fan group for a Star Wars character. Another person who seemed normal in forum conversations asked me to read her story, and it was just a graphic description of a gang rape using established characters. And I don't mean the story included a difficult scene. I mean there was no story, just a scene of gang rape with no warning that the content was explicit. I believe I was a minor at the time as well, though the person who sent me the story had no way to know that.

Ed Erdelac: I've personally found that so-called fans aren't particularly supportive of anything that isn't given the licensor's official stamp of approval or that doesn't go for broke and use the exact names of everything. Even then, there are perceived tiers of licensed fiction. All in all, too many amateur gatekeepers. I don't think I'd indulge myself in it again.

Jason Bullock: Conversely speaking to the answer of the previous question, I am limited in the level of changes to the characters beyond the established paradigms put in place by the original author. No permanent body modifications, no personal alteration that would destroy existing cannon, or death of lead characters is allowed when writing fan-fic.Bertram Gibbs: Finding a place to show and share your stories and get feedback to see what you could have done differently or, being a writer, get a modicum of praise because our egos could power a third world country (I know mine is).

Maya Preisler: For me, I’ve noticed it’s easy to become accustomed to the praise and positive feedback to where I feel less secure in my writing when no one is actively cheering me on. I’ve also noticed that the dopamine reward of posting a chapter is much quicker than publishing a short story (not to mention a novel), which makes me more likely to want to write fan-fic than the five original WIPs I have going.

Bobby Nash: I run into way too many people that think they can publish their fan fiction and make money off of it. That’s when fan-fic becomes theft and the publishers/IP owners start cracking down. If you do fan fiction, know that it cannot be sold. You don’t own it.

Danielle Procter Piper: The pitfall was discovering the person mentioned in the first answer. 

Susan Roddey: Readers are brutal. If you get even the smallest details wrong, fanfiction readers will absolutely level you in the most savage way possible. However, I think the biggest con is that there's a belief now that "if you can write fan fiction, you can change the names and call it original," and that's not always true. There has to be a differentiation between your world and theirs. You can't just scrape a few details off the top and pass it as new. There also seems to be a trend of fan-fic "rules of writing" bleeding over into original work. I see a lot of readers and editors complaining about things like point of view (fanfic rules don't widely accept an omniscient narrator in my experience), and many techniques that were used by the older writing generations appear to have been pushed out of popular use.

You'll have to forgive my soapbox moment, but as a con, one of the worst for me is the concept of real-person fic. Fictional worlds and characters don't bother me in the slightest because again...not real. Made up. There for the daydreaming. But I have seen some truly creepy things written about real people that toe the line of questionable. It's a worrying trend to me because it perpetuates the idea that celebrities "belong" to the fans. Maybe it's just me, but it makes me VERY uncomfortable.

How and why do you believe the world of fan fiction is changing? Do you see it becoming more or less acceptable to the reading public?

Jason Bullock: The acceptance of fan fiction is filling the void of mediocrity and overuse of story themes or clichéd elements presented to them in media across the board. With writing strikes involving established media outlets, you and I are always looking for that next great literary concept to share with everyone else in the paradigm of our favorite universes. Fan fiction is becoming accepted even more so in a wide range of target audiences. Children's fables to adult slasher stories, fan-fic is meeting the creative needs of many in today's story desert.

Kay Iscah: I think people are becoming more aware of what fanfiction is, particularly as we connect more with strangers who share our niche interests online. When I started writing fan fiction, I was a kid before the internet and thought I was the only person who did such a crazy thing. My first hope had been becoming a franchise novelist, but for Star Wars, you had to be invited which meant establishing yourself as an author with original work first. I even wrote a letter to Lucasfilm and got a polite rejection and a book mark.

Even some copyright holders have learned to embrace it as a way to keep fan bases engaged between releases. Like at one point Lucasfilm had fan film competitions and Pretty Little Liars experimented with letting people monetize fanfiction through a program with Amazon.

I think it will always be seen as amateur because it is amateur, and that's the fun of it. But a hobbyist knitter may still be excellent at their craft. The campfire storyteller may keep you spellbound. Monetization is not always a mark of quality. High point of my fanfiction career was having a librarian tell me that she like my version of Harry Potter's last year better than Rowling's.

However, I still know I was playing in Rowling's (or Lucas's) world. If I want to be ranked among the great writers, I can't just be a good wordsmith but also be a world builder.

Bobby Nash: As I mentioned before, there are folks out there trying to sell stories with characters they do not own. The publishers and IP owners then crack down and inhibit the fan-fic hobby for everyone.

Maya Preisler: I believe that as preservation of fan-fiction through online archives continues, along with support for legal protections, fan-fiction will become more popular and acceptable to the reading public for a variety of reasons.

First, I think fanfic provides readers with a lot of possibilities that aren’t as feasible in mainstream publishing because it eliminates a lot of barriers. Fan-fic is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, the text can be enlarged or turned into an audiobook with any screen reader, and it can be translated to someone’s native language in-browser. Additionally, fan-fic allows for the extension of comfort media, empowering fans who are craving familiar people and places to enjoy new stories within the safety of their favorite fandom.

Second, fan-fic has also historically been more diverse and inclusive than published media, as it allowed for the creation of works which would have been banned under the Hays Code or simply never considered publishable for containing certain subjects.

Third, fan-fic allows a fandom to evolve and adapt media franchises into something better. Many dedicated fans have already retooled several problematic IPs into alternate versions far better than the original ones ever could have been.

Fourth, the myths and legends which once collectively belonged to humanity are now owned by a handful of media companies and that number is actively growing smaller and smaller. Fanfiction reclaims the collective ownership of these cultural myths and returns them to the hands of the public, empowering us to former deeper personal relationships with them as we imbue them with better representation and deeper meaning.

Susan Roddey: It's absolutely becoming more acceptable, particularly with the awards bestowed on AO3 as a whole. There are absolutely some gems on that site, but there are also some pretty terrible things. I also believe that fanfic as a craft is on the upswing because people have less money these days and it's always (or at least it should be because we get into serious legal issues if it's not) free to read.

John L. Taylor: While I haven't written outright fan-fic, I'll weigh in with this. Works that become part of a culture's heritage are ones that have fan input. Creators like H.P. Lovecraft and George Lucas understood this, and their worlds have flourished for decades after their contemporaries faded. Star Trek had a very similar experience where fan writings of many kinds brought a dead IP back to life. It's weirdly important to a work becoming remembered and passed on to future generations. Mythologies begin that way, and fan stories make the difference between myth and a limited IP. Case in point: the SCP Foundation stories. The entire IP is literally fan fiction based on a random Reddit NoSleep post. Yet it is one of the most vibrant shared universes ever written. Let fan-fic thrive

Bertram Gibbs: I see more fan fiction sites popping up, but I also see what appears as stories that break the traditional characters and the way history has presented them. Some use LGTBQ angles, which while good are not truly showing the characters we love and respect. They are unnecessary twists that do not enhance the story and (I feel) are designed for shock value. Not saying that there isn’t an audience for these stories, but it feels like the focus is not on the heroes or villains or the hearts of the stories, but wish fulfillment of the writers.

I think that fan fiction can be more acceptable if there were more known and publicized sites that invite new and old writers to contribute, giving their spin on known characters, and to develop new, interesting and entertaining stories.

On the Dark Side (Yeah, Yeah) On the Dark Side...

For this week's roundtable, we're all going to take a walk on the dark side. (It's okay if you sang the Eddie and the Cruisers song just then.) 

Do you have limits to how dark you will allow your fiction to become? How do you determine those limits?

Sara Freites Scott: Yes I do have limits. I go by how it makes me feel when writing. I push it a little but if I start to feel too uncomfortable reading it back or even writing it I’ll scrap it.

John L. Taylor: Since my writing is mostly of a darker tone, I'll answer here. As to how dark I let it get, two things determine my limits:

1. The community standards of the publisher/platform, and 

2. the needs of the narrative and characters. 

Sometimes going needlessly dark works against you, but as a rule the less likable or "good" my protagonist is, the darker the antagonists need to be by contrast to still accept the point of view of the main characters. Stories like Blood Meridian and The Hellbound Heart wouldn't work with lighter treatments. But darkness isn't always just horrible deeds being done to someone for shock value. It's as much the way they process their experiences, beliefs, and traumas that's dark. There I wish community standards on platforms like YouTube were more context-flexible. I have a half-complete yet unpublished novel. The protagonist is someone who engages in self-harm behaviors and a big part of the plot is her overcoming her trauma and evolving beyond it. In no way does the work glorify this behavior or encourage it. Indeed, it takes a stand against self-harm. Still, any such descriptions are against Facebook and Amazon's standards, so the project remains unfinished because content platforms deem any depictions of such behaviors unacceptable without regard to context. That said, I do have hard limits on some content as both my wife and mother are survivors of abuse situations which I refuse to portray in a positive light or for rote shock value. Simply put, I'll write like Clive Barker or Dean Koontz, not Bentley Little or Aaron Beauregard. 

Lucy Blue: I write in two very clearly defined, very much opposite modes--light stuff like the Stella Hart books (which are downright frothy) and dark like The Devil Makes Three, which is very dark indeed. But yeah, there are limits. I'm good with disturbing or frightening my readers--I love it. I even enjoy the idea that my story might haunt them later. But I don't want to make them vomit. As a reader, I'm a total wuss, but as a writer, I blow right past my reader limits like I don't even know they're there. 

Ef Deal: There is a bottomless well of rage inside me. I have been to so many dark places myself that I have no choice but to go there when the story requires it, but I hate it, and I feel filthy with it afterward. 

Jason Bullock: I haven't tried to push my writing into darker elements in my writing anymore. As a storyteller doing tabletop RPGs for 20 years, I explored really dark themes often visceral in nature. Beyond what I would call sinister in my stories was what I now avoid. Imperfect man can perpetrate enough "evil" on his own not to involve external individuals or forces of a negative supernatural nature. There is a line I will not cross anymore. I had several personal encounters which shaded my own family life. I don't want to go down that terrifying part of my past again. So I take great effort to avoid it. Man and Science have enough order and chaos for me to write about.

Scott McCullar: I have an upcoming storyline in a future THRILL SEEKER COMICS story featuring Yellow Jacket: Man of Mystery as he attempts to retire by putting his guns in the ground so that he can finally find peace that gets REALLY dark. It was so dark for me to write and draw, I couldn’t even believe I was doing it… but the story demanded for me to do it and I could never escape not doing it. I finally completed it and I feel it is one of the strongest and most emotional stories that I’ve written and drawn. It’ll be in the next issue.

As for determining limits? I pushed beyond even what I was comfortable with but what was needed for the story to be effectual.

Bobby Nash: There are certain darker themes that I simply haven’t been interested in exploring. Never say never though. You never know when a great story will hit you that focuses on darker elements.

Danielle Procter Piper: Apparently not. I go deep, like Marianas Trench deep, into places most writers wouldn't venture into. I am all about disturbing people if it can make them think and/or at least entertain them in some way. 

John Hartness: Not until I start writing. Then I know how dark it needs to go.

Sean Harby: I write as dark as a story requires. As to how I decide that, I just kinda feel my way.

Susan H. Roddey: Oh, I can get pretty dark. The limit to how dark varies from book to book because different characters, just like us real breathers, have their own limits. There are a few hard stops for me personally - I don't like body horror, can't do terrible things to kids, and refuse to glorify assault - but beyond those, quite a few things can be considered fair game.

Jessica Nettles: I don’t have the limits written in stone and am willing to push when needed in a story. My stories and characters tend to let me know how far into the darkness to walk.

Raymond Christopher Qualls: The darkest story I wrote is "Manipulations." The daughter of a billionaire who needs multiple organ transplants, and he convinces members of a religious cult to kill a child so she can have pristine organs in his daughter's age range. It's in my Cosmic Egg for Breakfast and Six More Short Stories collection.

John French: There are some things I will not write about or do to my main characters. But when it comes to dark fiction, I recently found that just when I thought I'd reached my limit, I went further into the blackness.

If you are using the term “darkness” to refer to certain acts of violence, then I tend to avoid things like violence for the sake of violence or splatterpunk elements or slasher-style writing in my horror stories. It’s not my style.

Darin Kennedy: My stuff that is horror-adjacent typically is a lot darker. A little darkness, however, always makes the light stand out.

Sean Taylor: Not really. I like to go where the story needs me to go. If that means dark places, then I'll just light up a torch and make like Peter Cushing during the Hammer glory days. That's a kind of flippant answer, but it's true. Stories will let you know where they need to go to convey what they want to and need to say. 

TammyJo Eckhart: Most of my stories tackle something "dark" usually so that we can see success against it. The characters and the purpose of the story dictate how "dark" it should be.

Robert Bear: I'm in a sort of grim phase right now, and because it is specifically grimdark, I get it to where I start to feel uncomfortable with it, and then go a little darker. I think in my grim work, I'm exploring my own darker side... seeing just what I am prepared to experience (through storytelling)... because if you can't visualize, smell, or taste it... how can you write it? So, I have to research a lot of these things in order to get it right. So, 'how dark of a material can I stand to research' is what becomes the question.

Robin Burks: I like to push myself to go as dark as I can -- at least when I'm writing adult fiction (not YA, obviously). I love horror and the more uncomfortable it makes me, the better I think the scene is. However, there are some lines I won't cross, like rape, sexual situations with children, etc.

Dale Kesterson: I've noticed a lot of my short stories are considerably darker than my mystery novels, but I try very hard not to think about why. 

Jordan Leigh Sickrey: I feel like for me, I don’t like darkness for the sake of darkness. My main character in my fantasy novel was primarily built on the fact that female leads end up hardening themselves due to the “harsh realities” or they start off hard and maybe only dull their edges over time, and I wanted a female lead who could retain that softness and optimism. Yes, dark things happen. My prologue alone requires quite a few content warnings when I share it. But darkness isn’t the total story. It’s about finding the light in the dark and shining anyway.

Robert Lee: I once wrote a story, where the main character was a hitman and the very idea and notion of the story was everybody was a shade of gray and a level of hypocrisy for each person's position. The main character, The Hitman, tortured a gentleman by using a sharpened orange peeler, or maybe a lemon peeler. Yeah, I have no problems going in like that because it shows you the reflection of humanity's inhumanity toward others. I also abide by the concept that crime fiction at its darkest reflects society and humanity at its worst, but it also can show moments at its best but those moments are few and far between.

Teel James Glenn: I don't really write dark--for its sake. If I go dark it is to give my protagonists in the light balance and a challenge. Not a fan of nihilism.

Do you find writing darkness in your stories liberating? In what way? Or why not?

Lucy Blue: The silly thing is, I just write the story; I don't stop and think about how dark it might be. It's only later when my editor says, "geez, Lucy!" that I realize it might be darker than I thought. 😉 And that is liberating; that makes me feel like the story has taken on a life of its own that isn't limited by my own fears. 

Danielle Procter Piper: Is writing darkness liberating? I've never considered that...but it's as close to the rawness of my dreams as I can get, and I love dreaming. Many of my stories, screenplays, and pieces of art are dream-inspired. I suppose I'm hinting that the darkness in my stories is often a psychological mind-f*ck. Manipulating my readers' emotions is the highest pleasure I achieve with my work. 

Sara Freites Scott: Sometimes yes I do find it liberating! I’ll either find myself feeling thankful that I haven’t had such darkness in my own life OR share a dark moment in my writing from my past or someone else’s past that I know as part of the character's story that helps me to feel not so alone about it.

John Hartness: I haven’t thought about it in that way, so not currently.

Susan H. Roddey: I wouldn't necessarily call it "liberating," but there's definitely catharsis there. Going full dark is good for purging demons. It's how I work through things.

Dale Kesterson: Possibly cathartic? I do know I love 'killing people on paper' in the mysteries (third one came out very recently). I don't think I'll go overboard with it though.

Sean Taylor: It can be. But it can also be scary, not because of the content but because of the lack of outside edges to box me in. If I'm really free to go anywhere in a story, then I have to maintain a tighter grip on the reins of the storytelling itself. It can be too easy to go a step too far or let all that freedom go to your head and suddenly you're writing yourself out of a genre's or a publisher's and a target audience's good graces. When that happens, you have to make a choice. Keep the story going in a direction that might not be as marketable, or whip out that editing eraser. 

Ef Deal: It's not cathartic in the least; in fact, it feels more like wallowing, like picking at a scab until the blood flows anew: The wound never heals that way; it just gets worse. And no, I have no limits to the darkness I put on the page, although my publisher does, and she reins me back in.

Sean Harby: I do find it a little liberating. I had a Rockwellian youth, so darkness appeals to me.

John L. Taylor: Most dark stories emerged to sort out their emotions in bad situations. The very first recorded story, Gilgamesh, is really about the grief of losing your best friend. Yes, I do find writing darker material to be cathartic. Dark materials can both be a way to work through trauma and depression and to hold up a grim mirror to negative aspects of society. Some of my darkest work was either socially satirical or based on deep-seated anxieties. I've always had the philosophy that people flourish when they admit the darkness in their own subconscious and vent it. Take, for example, two very different works the hymn "It is Well with My Soul," and James O'Barr's The Crow. Both were written by men processing the senseless loss of their significant other. O'Barr's work took a much more visceral path to it than the hymn did, but both are lamentations of the human condition and attempt to reconcile a loving God with an indifferent universe. Each succeeds in its own way. I believe it is vital to the human condition that fiction be able to tackle difficult and disturbing subjects in an expressive fashion. 

Jessica Nettles: I mean, all good stories have elements of darkness, don’t they? I have never seen this as a factor for me.

Bobby Nash: I find something liberating about every story I write. Writing can be part therapy, part exploration of thoughts and feelings that are outside the norm for me, even a way to study and understand behaviors not my own.

Scott McCullar: I never thought about the word “liberating”. I think “cathartic” and “revealing” are more appropriate descriptions of what I have experienced.

Jason Bullock: Writing dark themes, I mean really dark themes, costs. The current chaos in our world tears enough at the individual but I don't feel liberated by diving into the truly abyss-level miasma. For me , crime, murder, and other such activities are about as far as criminal activity I would explore in my writing... well at this time in my life.

Are there advantages to writing darker stories that you don't have when writing lighter fare?

Sara Freites Scott: I think there are advantages! It can help connect a reader to a writer/character if there is some darkness because the world we live in is rather dark and we all have that darkness in us to some degree.

Sean Harby: Dark always seems more real to me.

Susan H. Roddey: I don't know that I can call it an advantage really, but I believe that darker stories are often more relatable. We've spent the last several years living in an actual dystopian horror show come to life, so we can relate to that kind of scenario. We all know what that despair feels like. So channeling that darkness into a situation where the good guy can win? Yeah, that's definitely going to draw people in and give them a sense of satisfaction at the end. Then there are some of us who sometimes just want to see the bad guy win.

Bobby Nash: There are certainly stories that benefit from darker themes or scenes. Evil Ways, my first novel, has some far darker stuff than I generally write today. It all depends on the story I’m telling and the audience I’m telling it to. Being able to delve into darker aspects when the story requires it is an advantage. Also, knowing when not to put the darkness on the page is an advantage.

Danielle Procter Piper: The only advantage to writing darker stories is the fun of taking the filters off, but it's also a dangerous thing to do because you may find your audience shrinking. Then again, writers always find their audience one way or another. Stephen King has gone to some pretty dark, weird places and still reigns in the world of horror. I'd like to write stuff that makes him squirm, though...is that too far? Maybe that's perfect.

Lucy Blue: I like knowing I can "go there" if the story demands it.

Jessica Nettles: Both can explore themes and characters in similar fashions. I see comedy and horror as different sides of the same coin, which is why they can work well together. The advantage could be in the audience you are trying to reach and what you want to say to that audience. For me, I don’t find an advantage in either. What I do find is a joy that I can write both and get a response from my audience that is positive.

Yes, I’m in it for the applause, folks. I ain’t gonna lie.

Scott McCullar: I like to balance both the light-hearted, fun, and loving as well as the darker opposites. There are advantages and disadvantages to both that I find. I have personally experienced death, despair, fear, darkness, and more in my own life and I think storytelling allows for those demons to be revealed just as much as the angels that need to show us the light (for example, in my MS. TITTENHURST Dame Detective stories… she is a guardian angel and not a femme fatale… which I wasn’t originally setting out to do when I began telling her stories in the THRILL SEEKER COMICS universe.)

John Hartness: I have to come up with fewer dick jokes on the darker works. Usually.

John L. Taylor: Piggybacking off of the last entry, darker subject matter leaves more room for whimsy than some lighter, but more serious fare. I'll hold up the works of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński in this respect. Their works, despite being visual, were genre-defining works of darkness not matched since Bosch or Goya, yet there is an overriding sense of whimsy and a shadowy allure to their images. Authors like Clive Barker, E.L. James, and Brian Lumley accomplish the same effect in words. That alone makes darker tones worth writing to me. The room for innovation in processing pain and reckoning with our mortality can create some such beautiful art if you have the tenebrous vision to appreciate it

Jason Bullock: Many people make excuses in those instances as there can not be moments of lighter fare if they are not contrasted by darker fields around them. I find that they are indeed diametrically positioned elements of everything and or everyone now in man's existence at this point in history. Writing is no different. When writing about negative elements, I try to end with presenting a positive outcome. In that way, my catharsis is less myopic and rather panoptic in its results.

Sean Taylor: I think a lot of folks, both writer and readers, confuse "dark" with either "gross" or "horrifying details." That's sad, because true darkness in a story is more of a context than content. It's more the overarching something that makes a story feel uncomfortable, even without a healthy (or unhealthy) slathering of body parts or icky descriptions. It's more akin to the difference between an atmosphere of dread and a laundry list of creepy images or plot points. A dark story needs light moments to let a reader breathe, even if just for a moment. So, for me, it's hard to write lighter fair because if I have a motif to all my work thus far, it's this: Humanity doesn't learn anything from the fluffy, happy moments, because it takes tragedy or near-tragedy to make us stop and listen in order to learn anything. 

The Power of Whimsy

Whimsy: "Behaviour which is unusual, playful, and unpredictable,
rather than having any serious reason or purpose behind it"
(Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers). 

When we think of whimsical writing we often default to the same kind of ideas. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Wind in the Willows. Mrs. Fisby and the Rats of NIMH. And typically books for children or young adults. But there's plenty of whimsy to be found in adult fiction too. Anansi Boys. The Left Hand of Darkness. Kim Harrison's The Hollows books. Something Wicked The Way Comes. (Just to name a few.) Some might even argue that pulp fiction and lots of action-adventure fantasies are nothing but whimsy stories for adults, feeding the hunger to see ourselves as the heroes unbound by the regular world. (Die Hard, anyone?)

How about you? Do you embrace the whimsy when you write? I figured that was a good question to put to the folks in the hot seat this week. 

How do you define whimsy for your writing? Do you think about it as you write?

John L. Taylor: For me, even in Horror, whimsy is a factor I incorporate into most of my work. I define it as a dreamlike quality that awakens a sense of wonder in the reader. It's one of the powerful aspects of fiction. being able to process the human condition through the lens of whimsy. Every truly successful classic of fiction has used it to some extent. Even Jane Austen and Herman Melville used small amounts of it to great effect, whether it was Austen's Regency-era visuals that seem dreamlike today, or Melville's legendary White Whale, the sense of whimsy helps the reader bond with the work. 

Susan H. Roddey: Whimsy is at the heart of my writing. It's a natural occurrence, probably because I write to escape the real world. 

Danielle Procter Piper: A bit of whimsy appears in my work when I add humor in a cheeky manner to either break up too much seriousness, to spin the storyline off in an unexpected direction, or to punch it up with a bit of humorous showmanship that is intentionally a bit unrealistic but fun. In one of my sci-fi stories, I added whimsy when my astrobiologist had to sedate a large, rampant alien, and when asked how he'd known what to do, mentioned he'd only seen it done on TV. It's unrealistic because he's serious enough about his job that he would never risk a life in such a reckless manner, but it's a pretty funny moment it exposes a bit of daring in the old boy, and it actually foreshadows an event further into the story. I might get a "joke" in my head as I'm writing and realize it will fit a section I'm working on, then include it, but I don't typically plot these moments. The muses flick them at me occasionally to see what may stick. 

Bobby Nash: Not really. I use wit and humor in my stories, usually character-based. I can't say I've ever thought about whimsy for whimsy's sake.

Jen Mulvihill: Whimsy is an important part of my writing because I write Y/A and I feel it shows how real the characters are and how they have not been fully jaded yet. My characters may have whimsical moments either in dialogue or by actions born of the spontaneity of the moment. There are a few characters who are whimsy by nature at all times. For instance, in the Steele Roots series there is a character named Raine who everyone thinks is just a bit touched. The truth is she just lives in her own little world and can’t be bothered with everyone else’s problems. She is no Lune Lovegood, but her comments and actions come off as unpredictable and out of step with the rest of the characters.

Sean Taylor: For me, whimsy is the power behind my writing before I ever start. I usually begin with "what if" questions, and that's where the whimsy sits enthroned. Only whimsy leads to questions like, "What if the mirror in Through the Looking Glass was the same mirror in "Snow White"? Or "What if a zombie writer came back from the dead and started writing her own posthumous work for her publisher husband?"

To what extent do you let a sense of whimsy guide your writing? Or are you more a meticulous follower of "the plan"?

Susan H. Roddey: I have a whole book series built on the most whimsical of premises (an Alice in Wonderland reimagining, as it were), so in the case of those books, I do let the whimsy lead. There's movement to it, sometimes hard and poetic, and sometimes goofy to the point of absurdity. The books are dark, violent, often gory, but also sensual and often funny. 

Jen Mulvihill: Other characters in my novels have whimsical moments and those are unpredictable even to me. I never plan them they just seem to happen as I write the story. It’s the characters who choose their moments and I simply journal the action or dialogue as it unfolds before me. I don’t think I could ever force or plan too much whimsy because I think it would feel forced and not flow properly or organically. But that is my style of writing and not necessarily the right way or wrong way of doing things, it is simply Jen’s way.

John L. Taylor: It's a cyclical process for me. Often a surreal or dreamlike visual theme or really moving line of dialogue occurs to me. I then go "so, how did this happen?" and create a plan on how to connect several of these through a linear plot. Sometimes that throughline will suggest new possibilities for the characters, adding further new scenes. Repeat until a finished first draft is ready.

Sean Taylor: I don't consciously think about whimsy as I write, but it does, as I said above in question one, drive the questions that create my stories. 

Danielle Procter Piper: I have seen that minimal use of whimsy in a story tends to be of greater benefit. Too much can destroy a story. Case in point; there's just enough magical whimsy in Raiders of the Lost Ark to open your eyes and make you question your beliefs briefly, which quickly turns humorous as we get to gleefully watch Nazis melt. There's too much in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which helped tank that film. If, for the most part, your stories are realistic...then, for the most part, keep them that way. If you've ever seen the original script for The Blues Brothers, you'll be glad Dan Aykroyd's whimsy was held in check. It's already a silly movie that gets sillier as it goes, but if you don't know, the Blues Mobile was nearly sentient and could perform on its own in a magical manner...which would have pushed things too far. 

Bobby Nash: No idea. When it happens, it just sort of happens. Usually, any sense of whimsy in my stories comes from my characters. You'd have to ask them. 🙂

Have you found that by embracing the "playful" and "unpredictable" as you write, you actually end up accomplishing the purpose after all? Why or why not?

Danielle Procter Piper: Playful moments in a story are certainly valuable, depending on what you're writing. I have found that my sense of humor seeps into everything I write even when I don't wish it to. Because I write horror...it's sometimes expressed in an incredulously dark manner, often extraordinarily disturbing if you're unable to recognize the humor in it. Again, to me, "showmanship"— that is, going over the top to grab the attention of the reader and drop a big hint on them they may not recognize until later, is often accomplished in a moment of whimsy. An example of too much whimsy would be Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings, or Harry Harrison's Bill, The Galactic Hero series. They're both actually very funny and enjoyable, but most people don't like them because they're too "far-fetched" and silly. Chevy Chase's Modern Problems is another example of too much whimsy killing a project, while Three Amigos works despite a heaping helping of it because it's a screwball comedy.

Sean Taylor: I try to keep myself open to the playful as I work, but I don't automatically default to the most "out there" ideas. For me, a lot of it depends on the story I'm writing. Sometimes a story gets so serious or dark that something odd or flippant really needs to happen. For example, I'm working on a story for my next horror collection about a house for sale at a basement-level bargain -- with the following caveat: the dead squirrel in the jar must remain in the cellar, or you can't buy the house. Because of the way I plot by questions, my plots are pretty much set by the time I actually start writing, but I try to remain open to where whims can take me.

Jen Mulvihill: I think by embracing the whimsical you embrace being human. Those little whimsical moments in life when you trip over your own feet, or do something laughably stupid and then turn around and own it, this makes life real; this makes characters real.

I also feel the need for whimsy in writing given sometimes the seriousness of the subject or event taking place, a little whimsy breaks up a serious moment without damaging the message if done correctly and organically.

Bobby Nash: Unpredictability is my method. Trust the characters and see where they take you. It's not the most elegant method, but it works for me.

Susan H. Roddey: It's fun to play with every aspect of human nature, twisting them up into magic and exploring the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy. [Just for reference, writing narrative poetry and iambic tetrameter is not easy.]

John L. Taylor: Playful more than unpredictable. I'm not afraid to blend elements that don't seem to go together. An example of this was my novella The Rocket Molly Syndicate. Despite being an alt-history pulp action story, we meet our protagonist in a scene with biplanes chasing pterodactyls. At first, the editors and proofreaders were like "What the hell is this?" but reviews by readers often praised that scene for its whimsy as a great metaphor for the chaos in the protagonist's life and making it read more like a 30's era serial/pulp tale than some modern pulps had. By going for the dreamlike aspects, much of the other out there visual cues like scenes on rocket packs or fights on airplanes seemed more grounded by contrast. Fear of whimsy is the death of imagination itself, the real mind-killer.

I used the above line to illustrate my point. In Dune, the Gom Jabbar makes no sense in the universe. Even with the Bene Gesseret having psychic powers, the Gom Jabbar is a magic box in a universe with no magic. But the scene is so powerful and establishes characters so well, and foreshadows later events that it becomes indispensable. That is the power of whimsy.

Horror That Inspires

Here's a roundtable for the horror writers. Let's talk about inspirations and influences as we jump into spooky month.

Which writers influenced and inspired you to write (or how to write) horror stories? How did they influence you?

Danielle Procter Piper: While I've read many horror stories and have been favorably compared to Peter Straub, I can't pinpoint a specific influence. I just write what I'd like to read. 

Susan H. Roddey: My reading material of choice as a kid was usually Christopher Pike or RL Stine, which morphed into Poe, King, Rice, and Jackson as I got older. The Dark Half was the book that truly cemented my love of the creepy AND made me realize that writing was something I wanted to do with my life because if that guy was crazy enough to give life to a pen name, then surely I could do something equally as nuts, right? But the truly transcendent moment for me was reading Frankenstein for the first time. Not only is it both beautiful and grotesque, but it was written by a woman at a time when women were little more than property. It also taught me that there is beauty in classic literature (sometimes), which led to a years-long sprint to read as many of those books as I could get my hands on.

Brian K Morris: As an occasional dabbler in the genre... Mary Shelley, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Bram Stoker, Dean R. Kootnz.

John L. Taylor: Weirdly, it was nonfiction paranormal writers like Daniel Cohen and Ivan T. Sanderson that first got me writing horror. I go for a more docu-fiction approach. Other Influences were Dudley Bromley, Frank Peretti, Christopher Pike, R.L. Stine, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton-Smith. 

Sean Taylor: My horror writer influences are more classic than most, probably. I find that I'm far more inspired and affected by the work of folks like Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and F. Marion Crawford. These writers really had a knack for mood and setting, and sadly, that's missing from a lot of modern horror in exchange for a more "go for the throat" sort of story. That said, I also love the work of Ray Bradbury when he turned to horror, such as his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes and the story "The Veldt." And while King is obviously an influence, I think I identify more with his son Joe Hill in terms of tone and mood for his horror stories. Now, after saying that, I'll concede that King is a master of the horror short story. 

Bobby Sisemore: H. P. Lovecraft because what he did was unlike almost anything that came before him, Village of the Damned because it was so eerie, Lovecraftian obviously.

Ef Deal: Not so much an author as an anthologist: Alfred Hitchcock books in our library had such wonderfully wry tales, and I like wry. I don't care for madness or body horror, but I like a cozy ghost story and philosophical vampire and werewolf tales.

Lucy Blue: So much of my style and habits of story construction can be traced directly back to Stephen King and Anne Rice. Which feels like a contradiction. King is so much about the intrusion of supernatural evil into the mundane--his brand of scary works so well on so many different readers because he establishes such a real, recognizable, ordinary world full of such ordinary, relatable characters for the scary to happen in and to. Even his monsters are petty and ordinary in their motivations and methods--they aren't romantic; they're hungry. Meanwhile, in Rice's worlds, even the cashier at the corner market has a supernatural glow and a magical backstory; she delighted in making her monsters as romantic as possible. Growing up goth, I adored both of them, and I think ultimately my own horror writing splits the difference.

Anthony Taylor: Roald Dahl, Rod Serling, Lovecraft, Charlie Grant. 

Stuart Hopen: I came to horror at an early age, reading Dracula for the first time in 2nd grade and Frankenstein a year later. The two books were powerful influences, leading in opposite directions. Dracula, at its unstaked heart is a heroic romance, a conflict of unambiguous good against absolute evil. Frankenstein is a tragedy, where the lines between good and evil blur. Frankenstein has deep roots in poetry and philosophy. Dracula has deep roots in theater, and the very model for title character was the greatest stage actor of his time. Dracula is fantasy. Frankenstein the beginning of science fiction.

Horror in comic books were a major influence on me as well. I was reading Marvel before they did superheroes. When Marvel comics set out to create a pantheon rival D.C.’s gods and legends, they mantled the universe in horrors, not absurdities. The Fantastic Four, the first Marvel demigods, had The Thing, a monster in their midst, and they fought other monsters—The Mole Man with his legions of underground behemoths, the Skulls, grotesque shapeshifters from outer space, the Submariner, the brutal psychopath from beneath the sea, who used to chuckle to himself when Nazis drowned or burned alive on their ships after being attacked. I bought Fantastic Four #1 off the stands, and it scared the crap out of me. The next Marvel entry was Ant-Man, who literally began in a horror comic patterned after the Incredible Shrinking Man, only to later don a costume and cybernetic helmet. And then came the Hulk, the cross between Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein. And the theology there was obvious—that beneath the horror and social dysfunctions of this universe, there is divinity, truth, and moral order.

John Morgan Neal: Richard Matheson. Nigel Kneale. Edgar Alan Poe. Shirley Jackson. Stephen King.

Jen Hart: I've always been drawn to the darker side of things so for authors: Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and way too many more since I always had a book in my hand as a teenager.

Chris Jowers: King. Shelley. Stevenson. Stoker.

Because we also learn storytelling from the visual delivery of movies, which movies influenced and inspired you to write (or how to write) horror stories? How did they influence you?

Brian K Morris: Psycho, the Universal Studios classics, the Hammer films, Kolchak: the Night Stalker, selected episodes of Doctor Who (LIke "Blink"), plus all those awful 50s movies I used to watch on late night TV.

Lucy Blue: With movies, I am very much more about ghost stories and gothic stories than I am monster flicks or slasher flicks or body horror. The first horror thing I ever remember seeing was a TV movie called Something Evil about a demonically possessed kid -- the kid was played by Johnny Whitaker, Jody from one of my favorite shows, Family Affair. I was deeply, deeply traumatized. And while I loved reading scary stuff, I was the wimpy kid who hid her eyes during scary previews until I was about 12 -- I had to be talked into going to see Star Wars the first time because the preview had "monsters" in it. Then I hit puberty right around the same time the Frank Langella version of Dracula hit pay cable, and I was lost to gothic horror forever. 😉

Ef Deal: Don't care for horror movies that are meant to gross you out. Give me Ash or Buffy. The most terrifying moment in The Exorcist was when Father Damien is listening to the demon voice recording and the phone rings. 

EVERYONE in the theatre screamed at that, then laughed at themselves. The same for the opening of Cabin in the Woods, two guys chatting when BAM! the movie title shocks you. Favorite horror movie? Tucker and Dale vs Evil. Or maybe Arsenic and Old Lace or You'll Find Out. Does anyone else remember Henry Aldrich Haunts a House? I'm a big fan of Black Mirror.

Jen Hart: Growing up I'd watch whatever horror movie I could. The earliest movie I saw was Poltergeist when I was 4 and that has always stuck with me, especially the ghost/demon in the hallway when the mom is trying to get to the kids. 

Danielle Procter Piper: My horror novel, Spiritual Concerns, is influenced by 1980s pop culture horror films, except I wanted to add a twist. It seems like they all had a gratuitous sex and/or nudity scene, and that's where I chose to put my most controversial scene. 

John Morgan Neal: The Univeral Horror films. The Hammer Films. The AIP films. Dan Curtis films. John Carpenter films.

Susan H. Roddey: I was never a particularly normal child (goes without saying since HELLO, WRITER!), and I was terrified of everything. My earliest memory of experiencing "horror" was my brother and his friend watching Poltergeist 3. The scene where they're walking down the hall and Kane is at each of the doors -- that visual and the associated terror stayed with me well into adulthood. I still don't particularly like mirrors because of it. It also started a lifelong obsession with horror. There's a place in my heart for the 80s slasher flicks, but my favorites are the more psychological movies -- the ones that don't rely so heavily on jumpscares and gore, but on the exploration of personal fear. That's why I loved Insidious so much (the final scene aside because it was dumb and didn't need to start a franchise, but that's another discussion). Blood and guts don't scare me, but watching true terror manifest before my eyes is fascinating. It's probably the same reason I love true crime and weird documentaries so much.

Sean Taylor: If I could ever capture in words the amazing set and tone that is the original movie version of The Haunting, I'd consider my life purpose achieved. I also learn a lot from when movies take left turns with their genres, like the sexual coming-of-age tale that is Dead Girl or Make Out With Violence, or the weird twists of many of Joe Landsdale's script work, my favorite being Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.

Anthony Taylor: The Sting, The Haunting, Rosemary's Baby, The Outer Limits, The Changeling, The Shining. 

John L. Taylor: Films that developed my style are Alien, Jurassic Park, Seven, Cloverfield, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Fly (1986), In the Mouth of Madness, and the Alien Autopsy video from 1995. I should add that the X-Files helped me learn pacing while the others taught me a love of surreal and body horror. The opening to Jurassic Park was still the most scared by a movie I'd ever been (I was 9 when I saw that, and it still stays with me). 

Stuart Hopen: I tend to prefer horror works that cross the boundaries of other literature, that is comic in both senses of the word as well as terrifying, like the Bob Hope classic film The Ghost Breakers, or The Wizard of Oz, which is as terrifying as it is brilliant social satire.

Is there a particular subgenre of horror you prefer to write, i.e. ghost stories, slashers, Lovecraftian, vampire, werewolf, etc.? Why?

Ef Deal: I write ghost stories, human monsters, and of course my paranormal steampunk that features a lycanthrope, but she's not the horror. My influences aren't really tangible, but I preferred The Twilight Zone to The Outer Limits. That probably tells you everything.

Stuart Hopen: My own writing includes illustrated novels: an epic World War I aviation adventure styled in the form of a depression pulp magazine, more Robert E. Howard style horror/adventure than the Lovecraft model that it draws upon; and then an imagined lost silent horror film, interspersed with comic book pages and recreated silent film stills, drawing upon horror classics of the silent film era, like Phantom of the Opera, West of Zanzibar, and Where East is East.

Anthony Taylor: Metaphysical, ironic, internal.

John Morgan Neal: Monsters. Ghosts/Haunts. Psychological. Metaphysical. Sci-Fi horror.

Sean Taylor: I really like it all except for when fiction tries to substitute gore for excitement. Hear me out. I don't mind gore, and I think gore can be used to help build excitement and tension in a story, but it can never be a substitute for it. I think, like with all stories, true horror always comes back to character. That's where I like to think my horror stories camp out, whether they are zombie stories serial killer stories, monster stories, or ghost stories. 

Brian K Morris: I find I prefer ghost stories and occasional vampire stuff. I'm more into mood than gore.

Danielle Procter Piper: I love writing stories in the most realistic way I can, so I typically tone down the supernatural elements. My background in biology helps me create very believable cryptids, and my interest in medicine allows me to create plausible explanations for human-type monsters. I do like incorporating parapsychology into stories, though... so ghosts are frequent antagonists.

Chris Jowers: I honestly miss monsters. Zombies, vampires, and zombies have become so commonplace that monsters are not getting their due.

Lucy Blue: I try to make my worlds as real as possible and my human characters as recognizable as possible, but my monsters are pretty darned romantic--not in a sparkly vampires way but in a supernatural evil/dark magic way. In The Devil Makes Three, that dichotomy between the evil of plain old horrible humans versus the evil of a supernatural entity is at the very center of the book.

Jen Hart: I'm a big fan of writing supernatural, ghosts, hauntings, vampires, grim reapers, demons.

Susan H. Roddey: I do lean more toward psychological and cerebral. I like the anticipation leading up to the "Big Reveal." I like exploring the edges of sanity and questioning the parts that don't always seem to fit together. I also like blending those elements with speculative styles to create something different. Sometimes a little bit of gore is necessary, but, for me, it doesn't have to be a driving force.

John L. Taylor: Lovecraftian and body horror. I find that Lovecraftian horror, told through a first-person docu-fiction lens is a very effective lens to convey horror through. Body horror connects with me on a deep, personal level. My Mom and Grandmother both had multiple bouts with cancer in their lives, and I nearly died of an asthma attack in 1991. I spent a lot of my childhood around hospitals, so the horror of the human body being grotesquely warped was instilled in me early on. Drawing on that deep fear. I find, lends to the verisimilitude of the horror. One of my personal favorite horror works of my own was a post I did on Reddit's Two Sentence Horror: I was relieved when the Doctor said the mass in my brain wasn't cancer. Until he let me hear its heartbeat." That gut reaction to something relatable is the real key to effective horror in my book.

Copycat, Copycat: Writers on Copying Our Inspirations

It's a common story. Writers get into writing because they're inspired by certain authors who have influenced them. And, almost always, at first they emulate them in at least style, if not substance and theme.

But let's move it from the general to specific and talk about YOU, writer.

Which author or authors were your beginning models to copy when you started? When did that copying start to shift into something that would grow into your own voice and style?

Ef Deal: My earliest influences were Bradbury and the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. Then Tolkien. The handwavium aspect of Bradbury is the basis of all steampunk, if you think about it, so yes that fantastic element is still in my works. But mostly I was influenced by my studies in French literature, where words were chosen for their greatest effect. Poe said all elements of a story should work together to create a unified effect, and that has been my guiding mantra.

Rob Cerio: Douglas Adams, Issac Azimov, and Clive Cussler. I think my style grew into its own after I stopped worrying about making jokes that sounded like "Bad Douglas Adams" Jokes, and just let them be funny on their own.

John L. Taylor: At the beginning, I was an imitator of Ray Bradbury and John Updike to a vast extent. All my work from that period was soundly rejected as it was a pale imitation of a superior author. I had tried to write a novel manuscript, but the early draft was a meandering pile of exposition. Note I hadn't tried writing horror or New Pulp yet despite being a major fan of the genres. I began developing a voice of my own, oddly, while writing erotica under a pen name for a now defunct website (Ironically, those unpaid stories are still my most widely read at 6k or more reads). I somehow connected with an audience by writing the type of story I wanted to read. My voice in writing finally emerged while writing The Rocket Molly Syndicate for the Dieselpunk E-Pulp Showcase Vol.2 in 2013-14. My Mom was fighting ovarian cancer as I was working on it, half was written in hospital waiting rooms. I needed a release and wrote pure escapist fiction. It connected, and the anthology it appeared in moved about 775 copies across all platforms and was adapted as an audio drama for the Coffee Contrails Podcast, adding another 200 or so downloads. It is still my most successful work to date. I dug further into New Pulp, but with a strong influence from Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. My next works were The Legend of the Wild Man, a 100 line narrative poem that ran in the Mythic Circle, and The Thing in the Wexler House, an audio narration that Otis Jiry performed for me on his YouTube channel. Both got solid receptions. As I branched into poetry, more growth happened, and My current style was cemented. Eerie, dreamlike narratives with a pulp twist. Also, writing online narrations helped a lot, as I was introduced to horror voices different from what I'd read before. Variety helps a lot.

Anna Grace Carpenter: The first I remember trying to imitate was Cordwainer Smith. He had a flair for not letting story get in the way of the occasional stylistic flourish and I loved it. Later Tad Williams and Raymond E. Feist made an impact on how I used characters to best tell the "exciting" parts in ways that actually had an emotional impact, plus a particular style of world-building that has stuck with me. (I would be hard-pressed to explain this, but I know that it's there because of reading their work.)

Things started to be less copycat once I really started writing a lot. The more I was using words in storytelling regularly, the more my own style began to emerge from the way I pictured certain scenes and the dialog I heard from my characters. At which point those authors moved from a category of imitation to one of influence.

HC Playa: So there are 4 authors that spurred me into writing: Sherrilyn McQueen, J.R. Ward, Karen Marie Moning, and Patricia Potter.

All four build intricate worlds, whether it's dropping you into the romantic lives of people in 1100 AD Scotland, a hidden Vampire society, a murder investigation turned apocalyptic collision of Fae realms and human, or weaving mythology into romance and adventure.

I didn't copy any of them directly, but they all made characters breathe on the page. They weren't afraid to weave love into blood and gore and battles. One of my favorite things that I did copy was the reoccurring cast that doesn't necessarily feature the same POV from book to book.

Ernest Russell: My earliest influences were Poe, Verne, Wells, and an anthology called Tales of Time and Space. Later Lovecraft and the circle of writers from Weird Tales.

Of these early influences, there is one that influences every story. That is Jules Verne. One of the things I LOVE about Verne's stories is he did research and did his best to not only incorporate the science and technology of the story's time period but to project it forward into what might become. As such I try, even in my fantasy writing to research what I am writing and make it plausible within both the world rules for the story and what I find historically or current science and technology and translate it into the story.

Frank Fradella: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert B. Parker, and Chris Claremont. Remove any one of them and I'm not sure I'd be a writer at all. My college professor in English told me to look at Parker for dialogue, and he was right. Fitzgerald showed me how to make prose feel like poetry, but it was Claremont who taught me how to tell a story. I had been reading comics books off the spinner rack for years, but the first comic book I *remember* is Uncanny X-Men #131.

Tom Powers: A weird mix of Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, and H.P. Lovecraft. Still echoes of them all, plus a bit of Norvell Page. Much of what I write is in the traditions of those writers' genres.

Pj Lozito: I wanted to write like Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Raymond Chandler and Sax Rohmer.

Teel James Glenn: Robert E Howard, Lester Dent, Peter O'Donnell, Dash Hammett.

Krystal Rollins: My inspiration: Mary Higgins Clark from my past, and my present is you,, Sean. Her work continues to inspire me in how I create my characters. Her words are printed in black ink and white paper but in my mind, it's blooming with color. I keep writing Sean because of you. (Editor's Note: Awww... Shucks. Thanks, Krystal.)

Charles Gramlich: Ray Bradbury for one

Murky Master: So Dragonlance and the anime Escaflowne, above all else, got me into writing seriously when I was about 13 years old. It took another ten years before I returned to that old dream, but I wrote part of a fantasy novel in those days that I am still surprised at its quality compared to what I wrote today.

John Morgan Neal: Stan Lee, John Broome, Gardner Fox, Bill Finger, Bob Haney, Denny O'Neil, Archie Goodwin, Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas, Doug Moench, Michael Michael A. Baron, John Ostrander, Mike Barr, William Messner-Loebs, Bill Mantlo, Marv Wolfman, and last but opposite of least, Chuck Dixon.

Michael Dean Jackson: When I started writing (as Jack Mackenzie) I was inspired by a lot of military science fiction; Heinlein, Jack Campbell, David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, etc. It was with those inspirations that I wrote THE PARADIGM TRAP and THE MASK OF ETERNITY.

Do those elements of your inspirations still show up in your current work? Howso? Are they things you do consciously or have they just been internalized by the years of doing them?

Frank Fradella: Completely internalized. I took Parker's style for a spin on its own, and it felt like wearing one of those 1970 Halloween costumes that comes with the hard plastic Batman mask attached by a string. It was a conscious choice to find me in that amalgam, and that's the writer I became.

Anna Grace Carpenter: I do still love a stylish bit of storytelling. Voice, unexpected use of language and grammar (or lack thereof) to catch the reader's attention at a critical moment are some of my favorite things. And that all grew from early attempts to mimic Cordwainer Smith. And the storytelling inspiration I got from Feist and Williams is still there too. Using all the characters to tell the story whether we see their PoV or not. Allowing heroes to not always be heroic and villains to not always be villainous without diving into a grimdark grey. And allowing tragedy to occur, sometimes in very small ways that adds a bittersweetness to big triumphs.

I don't think it's deliberate, it's just how those inspirations encouraged my own voice and writing the kind of stories I like to read. Because that was what first made me want to imitate them - they wrote stories I loved. And now I write stories I love so the influence is still there, but organically after years of practicing my own storytelling.

HC Playa: At some point, I found my own writing voice, but for all my novels, these elements remain, including having two central protagonists (usually a male-female romantic pairing, but like JR Ward, I branched out the more I wrote).

Depending on the story it can almost seem like a hero and side-kick type of casting, especially as I pit them against larger-than-life dangers. (As I type this I suddenly see why my publisher says my writing is pulp 😂.) I don't lean into the romance aspect as much as those authors tended to. More like Moning's Fae Fever series, the romantic aspects take a back seat to the apocalyptic events and characters dealing with their issues.

I have read plenty of classics of multiple genres, but it would be disingenuous to say I am influenced in style by those stories.

I don't aim to write the next classic that future college students dissect to figure out what I meant when I said the sofa was an ugly flea market reject.

I write to entertain. I use elements from the stories I love reading. I love weaving in magic and the amazing, because life always needs magic.

John Morgan Neal: Yes. I'm a big ol' ape in more ways than one. But never outright. The stuff I love is in my DNA. So it has to shine through.

John L. Taylor: Many facets of my inspirations are like a reflex now. A subconscious thread. I still lean on Lovecraftian themes and first-person narrations in horror but avoid the adjective salad pulp writers often used when stories paid by the word (Lovecraft was great at taking a whole paragraph of them to say "it was an amalgam of parts that defied description, an offense to biology itself.") I guess that's the real difference between me and my inspirations: I prize concise writing. I suppose that's the last vestige of Updike left in me. But it's a great influence to retain/

Rob Cerio: I still feel like I use Cussler's "opening Gambit" formula and basic formatting of action scenes. Azimov's use of "working-class schlubs" is something that still crops up all the time in my work.

TammyJo Eckhart: I can't answer question one so question two also doesn't apply. While there are authors that I loved and still love, the idea of copying them in any way never entered my mind. I was writing stories from kindergarten onward.

Murky Master: Things I took from Dragonlance were:

• mixing cultures is both hugely interesting and creates lots of conflict, from Tanis Halfelven's internal identity drama. I'm biracial myself so it was interesting seeing someone "like me"
• Bad guys are F-ing Awesome. Raistlin made a permanent mark on my picture of wizards and magic and the lure of power magic brings. You need no further proof than to behold my profile pic, after all. Nothing makes me hahaha quite as much as my hourglass-eyed boi. Lord Soth was pure mother finding METAL as well and remains my fave Ravenloft Darklord.
• Escaflowne was a romance and an epic fantasy all at once. Later on, I would actually sit down and read a romance novel and find it totally awesome, and I like to have strong, real relationships in my books because of that anime.
• also, the anime was grand in scope, full of pathos and beautiful at times, unspeakably cruel at others (looking at you Dilandau). It helped me understand PTSD and the weight of honor as well as the power of dreams to destroy and create. Dilandau also made me like insane villains.
• the Adventures of Batman and Robin cartoon with Bruce Tim as the art director also made me love art deco and Pulp sentiments. The episode featuring "The Grey Ghost" and Brendan Frasers The Mummy sealed my fate. Now I can't help but have all cap titled like DESTROYERS FROM WALMARTS BEYOND and COURT OF THE GLISTENING LUNCH LADIES and such.

Chuck Dixon: I read so much before I started writing for a living that I have no idea who's work I've intuited over the years.

Michael Dean Jackson: However, around the time I was writing my books I discovered the television series SHARPE on the History Channel. I loved every episode and I loved Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe. So I figured I would try the novels by Bernard Cornwell and I loved them even more. The books were, I found, immensely better than the show.

And it was those novels and the character of Sharpe who fired up my imagination and helped me come up with my own, military SF version, a character called Jefferson Odett.

I have only written two Jefferson Odett books, DEBT'S PLEDGE and DEBT'S STAND, but I do have a third one that I may eventually get to. Nevertheless, Jefferson Odett is more than a little inspired by Richard Sharpe, in the same way that Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forrester's seafaring adventure hero, inspired Bernard Cornwell's character.

I am under no illusion that my novels have anywhere near the quality of Cornwell's or Forrester's, but the inspiration is there.

The Soul Sneaking into the Creation

This week, we're talking about how much of your soul (see yesterday's Motivational Monday) goes into your work. Are you intentional, do you avoid it, or does it sneak in regardless? How much of your "soul" do you put into your work? 

How much does your writing reflect your personality?

Ef Deal: I don't think any one character reflects my personality; each of my main characters does carry a piece of me. One is always focused on work to the exclusion of all else. Another is mistrustful of the world, but fiercely loyal once her trust is gained. Another is Earth Mother to younger people, and Mama Bear if you hurt one of them (or in her case, Mama Wolf). Music is a huge part of my stories.

Bobby Nash: There's a lot of me in my work. There's a small piece of me in every character, some more than others.

Barry Reese: I don't usually sit down and deliberately try to put my personality and beliefs into my work but I'm sure it creeps in, especially over time.

HC Playa: As a beginner writer: oh I don't put THAT much of me into my work.

Me re-reading after awhile and lots of personal growth... 👀 Well then that character hits a lot closer to home than I thought.

As I have written more I feel like all my characters are an amalgam of traits, some from me and some from people I have known. I'm smart and sarcastic and it took me like 5 novels to realize all my characters are either highly educated (traditionally or by some alternative means) and very smart.... probably smarter than the average bear. I put in a few comical morons, but realized that my worlds are potentially unrealistically populated with smart people 🙄. Why? That's what I know. While not particularly educated, my mother is quite smart and fostered in myself and my siblings a love of learning and questioning. Growing up with equally gifted siblings, gifted friends, attending university and majoring in chemistry, working research and getting a PhD and in turn having equally gifted children... My world definitely skews scary smart with the occasional average individual. It's one of those things I didn't intend on putting in, but it's a reflection of my lived experience.

Susan H. Roddey: My writing definitely reflects my personality. My weird sense of humor and love of snark tend to come out a good bit in dialogue.

Marian Allen: Quite a lot. My writing almost always involves exploring the question, "What does it mean to be my brother's keeper?" I also almost always explore it on a tangent, bouncing off into humor and oddity. 

John L. Taylor: My writing reflects my artistic and visual aesthetic more than my personality. I tend to put some of my anxiety or childhood phobias into my horror writings but rarely does a character really reflect me as a person. The only story I ever really my own personality into was called "Flying Cars," and was about raising a child with Autism. It's also the only story I ever won a cash prize for, so maybe I should more often. 

Sean Taylor: I'm not the kind of writer who can keep my "soul" out of my work. If something is a part of me, it's going to work its way into the nooks and crannies of my writing. Feelings, things I'm studying or researching, themes, POVs -- I just can't keep them out. They don't always come out in my actual characters though, more often through my metaphors and themes and consistently appearing subject matter. And the more I change and grow, the more my writing will reflect those changes. 

An example, the more I get fed up with the battle my LGBTQIA+ friends and folks have to fight to change the system (and just be acknowledged as important to the world), the more I will see them and that battle reflected in my writing. But not in a preachy or "let's make a point" way. It will be reflected more in the types of stories I tell and how their stories become important within those tales. 

Another example, I grew up in the South and I bleed red Georgia clay if you cut me. So that's the world I know best. That's the world that seeps out, either in the setting or in the backgrounds of many of characters. 

How much does your writing reflect your personal beliefs? 

John L. Taylor: My political and religious beliefs usually only manifest in my poetry. Though in my horror writing, I lean on what people would consider traditional "Satanic" imagery (Satanic in the "what rural Christians think devil worship looks like," not Satanic in the "Anton LaVey/modern Satanism" sense). That is both a product of my upbringing and an attempt to resonate with a rural American audience, but doesn't represent my opinions or beliefs.

HC Playa: As for beliefs, I use stories to hopefully make readers think or at least weave a bit of tolerance into their mind. Most of my protagonist share my beliefs in some way or go through a personal growth arc that opens their eyes. I wasn't particularly good initially at writing bad guys that didn't come off as comically over the top. The more I write the better I have gotten, but it still is a challenge to write characters that are extremely different morally. 

Barry Reese: I mean, I'm a liberal pacifist that has made a career of writing gun-toting vigilantes. In terms of my personal and political beliefs, I'm not really like most of my recurring characters... BUT they all share some of my spirit, regardless. 

Sean Taylor: Like I said earlier, every part of who I am ends up getting into my stories. Even in little ways. As a Christian believer (in spite of how my conservative friends and family think I'm become a sort of liberal heretic --ha!) I have a strong weakness for redemptive stories (I even wrote a tutorial about it here on the blog -- check out he keywords on the side of the page for links). My characters tend to understand religion and reflect a worldview that at least started with some kind of religious instruction, even if they no longer believe or follow it. 

I also tend to revisit the idea that people only learn through pain and loss, and we are too stupid to really learn and embrace change during times of great joy, and so that's also a common theme in my work, which tends to reach the point of bittersweet-ness at best, seldom true joy. 

Susan H. Roddey: My personal beliefs are always expressed in my books, whether intentional or not. I've always considered my stuff to be purely escapist, but the more I look in on it, the more I realize that more conservative readers might be put off by some of what I write.

Bobby Nash: Some. I can't have every character thinking the same way I do, believing the same things I do, etc. That leads to boring drama if there's no tension. I try to let the characters be as well-rounded as possible. I get better interactions that way, I think.

Ef Deal: My religious beliefs are all over my works. In my fantasy series, my MC was betrayed by her lover, a temple priest, so she rejects all religion although she is a dedicated believer in the Sacred Spirits. In my steampunk, my MC has a thorough knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and studied Scripture (such as it was known in 1843) on her own to arrive at her beliefs, which are thrown into turmoil as she encounters lycanthropy, magic, ghosts, vampires, and the aether. She has a lot to say about it, too.

Do you find it easy or difficult to write characters whose beliefs and personalities are vastly different than your own, and do you tend to relegate them to side characters or use them as main characters? Got any examples? 

Ef Deal: I've learned a lot about religions of the world, and I've seen religion used as a weapon as much as a healing balm. I've experienced divine visions, and I've suffered immense prejudice for my questions and doubts and rejected tenets of dogma. I feel pretty confident writing the good and the bad of any religion.

Other aspects of "personal beliefs," such as ethics, politics, relationships, gender perceptions, etc., I admit I'm not so adept at. I'm a big believer in mercy and redemption as much as I embrace justice. I like to believe the best of people, but I feel comfortable writing the worst too.

Marian Allen: Difficult. For instance, Darryl, in Sideshow in the Center Ring, is a rat bastard, the shadow character of the narrator, Connie. They come from the same background, and superficially have the same goal and seem to have the same attitude, but the fundamental difference between them is profound. I had the hardest time writing him! The most grinding, forced work I did (although it doesn't seem so when it's read) was writing Darryl, possibly because he was so close and yet so far from my main character.

Barry Reese: The notion that justice and the law are not always the same is something that I agree with... as is the feeling that you stand up for the underdog... and the idea that guys and gals in thigh-high boots are sexy is something that I and my characters all agree upon! I have occasionally written characters that were diametrically opposed to me... but, honestly, they usually end up as the antagonists in my stories.

HC Playa: For example in my first novel, the villain is an alien bent on domination based on past glory. While there have been plenty of historical figures that fit that trope, it's a simple villain.

In a novel I have written that's in the publishing process I have an immortal being that at first glance seems just as over the top and evil for evil sake as the Goloth ruler in Daughter of Destiny, but then we start to see glimpses of his motivations and the picture starts to shift. Who is good and who is bad becomes a bit murkier.

Personally, I feel this is more like daily real life. People are not all bad or all good. Good people can do bad things and bad people may truly think they are doing the right thing or be guilty of atrocities and still do good things. Real people are murky and so well written characters reflect that.

John L. Taylor: I don't find it difficult to write perspectives other than mine in general. Truthfully, writing gives me an outlet to understand other people and voices than my own. I have faced the criticism children in my stories seem incredibly dumb/gullible. This stems from the fact that growing up as an autistic kid, I was reminded constantly that I wasn't normal. Hence I initially wrote children to be like what adults in the 1990's seemed to expect kids to be. Apparently, I overkilled on that.

Bobby Nash: It's not difficult. I've been doing this long enough that I can divorce the characters beliefs from me. I have written characters doing and saying horrible things I would never even comprehend. I remember that they are unique characters. They are not me. I'm here to tell an entertaining story (I hope) and not to preach or push an agenda.

Sean Taylor: I write all kinds, and they all suffer under the weight of my ink. (Ha!) I really love the idea I learned from C.S. Lewis that the greatest good can become the greatest evil if we begin to make it the thing we truly "worship" with our thoughts and deeds and emotions. It's a lesson from his awesome book The Great Divorce. That kind of spiritual hubris tends to affect both my heroes and villains alike, so it makes it easy for me to write them all, regardless of their individual beliefs, POVs, genders, sexual identities, etc. 

Susan H. Roddey: Writing characters with different personalities isn't "difficult" per se -- not in that they're hard to write. They're hard for me to UNDERSTAND. But people are different and they have different motivations. Conflict always starts with a difference of opinion, so they're necessary. As a rule, I try to avoid blatantly obvious political/religious/social clashes (I'm writing books to get out of the real world. I don't want to bring it into my fiction) because I don't want to alienate people. The one example I could give is the one thing I've written that may never see the light of day simply because I'm not the type of writer to let that kind of personal catharsis out into the world.