On Inspirations: Works That Have Built My Literary Identity

Greetings!

Here I'll talk about the literary works that have inspired me to start writing my own stories. It's no secret to those close to me that Tolkien is my biggest inspiration in creating a story from scratch. By that, I mean inventing history for fictional countries, inventing alphabets for the languages spoken in the world of my novel-in-progress, and developing the cultures of the different races that will be featured in my works.

Admittedly, it's hard to come up with original ideas when there's so much literature out there and a lot of it would influence me whether consciously or subconsciously.

Still, this realization hasn't discouraged me from trying to give my own twist to the fantasy genre. I grew up reading the Harry Potter books and watching the movies as a kid and the concept of a modern society where magic exists has had a lasting impact on me and that gave me the idea to set my world in the contemporary era. Of course, I had no intention of my story being a copy of a boy going to a wizarding school. My intention instead, was having my story feel like a modern myth.

Greek and Roman mythology were my go to books aside from Tolkien in high school and seeing the stories of heroes embarking on deadly adventures, fighting beasts, their flaws leading to their downfall, and the gods stepping in during crucial moments made this formula appealing. From there, I've been steadily implementing the trope of a flawed hero traversing a new, unfamiliar world after having previously lived in the ancient period of the world's history (a nod to the mythic era of the Mediterranean). Later on I've read some of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and that led me into a rabbit hole about the beauty of writing the incomprehensible, the unknown, and the effectiveness it has of leaving the mystery to hostile forces to build up dread for the reader.

That's the main story of how I got the DNA of my manuscript when I first started writing. I wouldn't want to blabber on and repeat the same points. On a sidenote, I have read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy recently and despite the gruesome violence in the book I was enamored by the highly descriptive, metaphoric environment McCarthy wrote and that has been my newest inspiration to sprinkle some of that into my chapters, but at the same time not to go overboard and come off as a desperate imitation.

What are your influences and inspirations?

Thank you for reading!