Under the Influence

How what I read filters into what I write.

Let's talk about style.

I find style influences mood and momentum as much as plot and character. It’s not just the mechanics of the plot that needs constant refinement, not just the heartbeat of the characters, but the very warp and weft of the words you use, their choice and placement, that is as alive and sometimes as challenging.

I can come back to a piece days later and find joy in the replacement of one word with a more apt one, a word that has more resonance with the mood of the piece. Words are the blood of the story, carrying its energy and life. I can spend an hour searching for the right word only to discover that one doesn’t exist in my native tongue and a French or German word expresses it better. This is damned irritating! I have also been known to mint a word of my own if it captures the mood more evocatively. Words should be lushed over, never rushed.

So I collect wordsmiths. Masters of the craft, and I read them again and again. I read from a broad spread of literature to extend my understanding, my sensitivity to the placement of words.

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The downside of all this is that the influence of grand masters can spill over into my own work. Do you experience it as well?

Take Mervyn Peake for example. His descriptive power is intensely painterly, poetic and baroque. Here’s a brief passage from Titus Groan

“The room was heavy with silence, broken only by the distant echo of footsteps in the vast corridors beyond. This silence, pregnant with the weight of tradition and the ghosts of countless Groans, seemed to press down upon the occupants of the room, making the very air thick and difficult to breathe.

As the infant Earl lay in his cot, oblivious to the weight of his inheritance, the shadows of the room seemed to gather around him, as though the castle itself were watching, waiting, whispering secrets of old to the tiny form that would one day be its master. The tapestry’s faded hunters, frozen in mid-pursuit, bore witness to the beginning of another cycle, another chapter in the endless, unchanging saga of Gormenghast."

If find Peake’s lushness can crop up in my own work at certain times.

“Olivia peers through the dust of the Rover’s passenger window at the black bulk of the Burning Bear. It looked as if a galleon had collided with a grand house, settled into the ruins. and caught fire. Its walls were as black as char. Its  leaded windows bowed from the heat and the diamond panes cracked and as yellowed as old teeth. Perhaps there is brick and stone beneath the crazed charcoal of the pub walls. To be certain Olivia would need to get closer, and deep in her gut, she knows she should never get any closer.

A sign hangs from a horizontal pole high above the arched and crumbling entrance, a painting of a bear’s head haloed in flame. The painting on the cracked and peeling rag of a board is distressed by many winters, but the malevolence in the bears eyes still finds her and pins her to the worn leather seat of the mad old English car. Cat bones in the foundations, she remembers. Cat bones in the London clay. Or perhaps, at the ground breaking for the Burning Bear, the offering had been larger?”

Similarly I love the crisp laconic style of Raymond Chandler. It is direct, purposeful prose but it also comes with some vivid almost cinematic descriptions and some stunningly apt similes. The similes I haven’t mastered and I would love to, but I find that his crispness and laconic descriptions can influence me just as strongly as Peake’s ornate and dense prose.

Here is the opening sequence from ‘The Big Sleep’.

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the Terrace Room at the Dancers. He was leaning against the partition that was already leaning against something else. His white hair was hanging down over his face and his eyes were tight shut, and he was wearing a white linen dinner jacket that had a spot on the lapel. He didn't look so tall lying there, but he was over six feet.

He made a nice picture, it would make anybody want to get down on their knees and pray for the man who invented dry martinis."

As with Peake, there are other times in the same work that I find I am tacking towards Chandler.

“By four in the morning Chari has the gut deep feeling that none of this is real. The bed, the tall windows, the street of white stucco mansions beyond. There is a meniscus of Vaseline over reality, like the way old movie technicians used to create a soft focus, but this is internal somehow, a soft focus of the mind. She feels she’s in some Hollywood noir, all black shadows and impossible events.

Bogarde was going to walk through her bedroom door any moment holding a gun. That would be a good result. Bogarde would know what to do.”

Perhaps I need to make clear I am not claiming my own work is anything like the quality and sheer naked competence of a Peake or a Chandler, far from it. But I do find it entertaining to find how who I read influences my work so overtly.

But what to do with this trait? Do I worry that I have not found my own voice, or do I relax and accept the trait for what it is. Direct imitation is crass, but you can’t stop what you experience affecting how you write. And sometimes reading the masters can be the best experience you can get.

I am not going to worry about it too much. The style varies naturally with the scenes I am working on, and if a certain richness serves one scene well and a hard-boiled approach is more suited to another, well providing it works, why not?

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The two excerpts of my own work are from the early stages of a follow on novel from ‘The Pattern Mafia’. I sometimes find ideas for another plot crop up at the most inconvenient time.

It’s not prevarication, its parallel processing, honest!