17/01/2010

Influence… yeah. It can be so subtle as to almost be comical.  It’s so easy for something you’ve seen or read to sneak in through some hidden trapdoor or unlatched vent and curl up in yr. cortex completely unnoticed until one day yr. moving yr. creative furniture around and… there it is.
Anyone who knows me even just a tiny bit knows how much I like weird/nasty cinema, for example. I go crazy for Takashi Miike, Lucio Fulci, that kind of stuff. But do I ever feel the wish to write that kind of story these days? That’s playground stuff as far as influence goes. For me, influence is about an eye for detail trumping the big issues governing creativity. I mean, we’re adults. Surely we can come up with our own themes and moods? Borrowing yes, wholesale snaffling up because I’ve just seen a Female Prisoner Scorpion film and now I want to write Women In Prisoner stories… hmm.
Another example. Watching a Coffin Joe film today I saw a row of little glazed ceramic skulls lined up on a shelf in the background. I noticed these articles before I registered what the character in the shot was saying or doing, and as soon as I became aware of this it made me realise that at that point in time, perhaps just for an eyeblink, I’d forgotten about the possibility of having glazed ceramic skulls sitting on a shelf in one of my stories. And why stop there? Why not glazed ceramic lemon, porpoises or South American fertility charms? And why a shelf? Why not a trampoline or billiard table? I think what I am trying to say is that developing an aesthetic is important for a writer, and that this aesthetic can characterise our work having travelled a great distance from it’s source. I have no desire to write about murder but there’s as much Dario Argento in my writing as there is Raymond Carver.
It’s taken me fifteen mins. to type that little lot out one handed; that must be some kind of personal best! I really must try to get back into the swing of things and crack on with some writing this week…