Inspiration - Blessing or Bane

.....i don't know how I can answer this - how I can answer anything. Just about every single one of these posts have come up when I both need the distraction and can't possibly handle the distraction....

Frustrating to the extreme when I can think.

Alright.

Inspiration

Aren't you excited....

JRR Tolkien

If you're surprised by this one you don't know me and you didn't read my last post.

The latter more than the former.

The Hobbit was the first I read. And I read it about fourteen times consecutively.

I did finally put together Lord of the Rings and got to read that, and the appendices-!!

Oh....genealogies, lines of kings, language, pronunciation, culture..... All stored within there.

I love languages. I LOVE languages. The history, the origins, the cultures - all ties together. I love how languages work, how they adapt and share and..... Yeah. Anyway.

And then Tolkien created a language from SCRATCH!!  (Well, not entirely - but enough.) How amazing is that?

And his characters... I love the stories. The people.

It also helped that I started discovering my interest in writing at the same time I was reading him.

I love mythology. I love to rewrite it, take it, use it, redo it....   To find out that he did the same thing with LOTR? Precious.....

Tolkien's stories are adaptable. Read them through once and one sort of character shines through. Read it through again at a different point in life, and a different character shines. Some of the characters are incredibly flat, true - but in the story....

He built a world. A life. He made Heroes and legends. I could never write that well....

On a complete random note - Christopher Lee MET Tolkien??

C.S. Lewis

First: who names their son 'Staples'??

Second: the day I found out that my favourite two authors were actually friends was better than Christmas.

Tolkien gave me the complexity and the characters - Lewis gave me the stories. Lewis gave me the lives.

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first book I really voluntarily read outside of school. It was lying on the floor and I picked it up because it had an interesting cover. I was about eight or nine and...

I was seven.

I picked up the book because it had pictures of knights on the front and I wanted to know what it was about, and then there were pictures inside!

Funnily enough, I didn't pick up on the symbolism of Aslan until we watched the movie about a year later.

(Oh! And dear Reader? Would you like to guess who my favourite character was?

Lucy. I loved her because she was so good and faithful and innocent. Peter was a boy, Edmund was bad, and Susan sort of...didn't count.

It wasn't until I grew up that I stopped liking the good heroes. I used to admire them...)

Because of that book, I looked for the rest of the series (we didn't have it. I was the only one that read that one. I don't even know why we had it - no one knows....) and ended up reading just about every book we had in the house.

My failing is that I do judge books by their covers - but that's probably a good thing so I could grow up a little more.

But that was the book that got me started reading - that opened me up to the world of fantasy.

The very, very first story I wrote was about siblings named Edmund, Peter, Susan, and Lu and how they wandered into a wardrobe.

.....the really sad part about that is that it took me about a year to realise what I had done - thankfully I never shared my writings even then.....

Mythology

Oh good gracious.....

Yeah, this is the basis of my first fifteen books. Mythology.

I grew up on darker movies. Vampires, spies, murderers, criminals, horror....  I'm sure there were good ones - but honestly most of them shouldn't be shown to someone under ten. (...and then he wondered why I wouldn't go outside in the dark...) Some things in life I'm incredibly oblivious to, other things I am more aware of than I should be. Some are my fault, some not.

But mythology.

As much as I fear it, I love the elegance of darkness. I adore the beauty of danger.

And mythology isn't copyrighted - I can use the stories.

The darker the story, the more interesting the creatures, the farflung trivia - I love using it.

Besides, then I can write weird research papers on vampires....  *rolls eyes*

I generally use European mythology, but anything is interesting.

I love the tie-ins with history.

Sebastian Roché

I'm blaming this on the Reader.

I tend to profile characters. Especially in EXTREMELY. PREDICTABLE. SHOWS!

Like Grimm. Where he played a character. And died. (it's unsurprising even if you DON'T know his usual characters...)

Long story short? His characters are generally loyal to a fault, polite, principled, and if they aren't outright villains that you'll still emphathise with anyway they are people with rather dark morals. Oh. And he usually seems to die.

It's like casting Sean Bean as someone.

Why is he inspiring anything? I'm really not sure but since he is I figured he fits here......

He has inspired three massive story universes so far.

The Mind

Along with or more than the others, I am inspired by the mind. What goes on inside of mine, what goes on inside of others' - what do they deal with? What do they hope? What do they dream? Fear? Love? Hate?

I'm inspired by those that succeed and those that fail. Those that break and those that heal. I'm inspired by the beautiful and the hideous. I'm inspired by the strong and the shattered.

Especially by the ones that have shattered and ARE strong. That broke and DID heal. That are beautiful AND hideous.

I'm inspired by those that put others first, that die for others and never expect anything back.