The texts that shape us

A reflection

Nov 11, 2023

Because I write such a wide range of things, in such a variety of genres and media, when I get into a new project I tend to seek out most of my influences from whatever specific texts happen to be most relevant to the project at hand, whether that's Tom Stoppard, P G Wodehouse, or '70s rock music. There are, however, a few key texts from my childhood that have profoundly shaped my person. No matter what I’m writing, the echoes of these major influences will always be somewhere in the background.

First: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The full series was gifted to me by an aunt for Christmas one year when my hereditary slightly-absurdist sense of humour started growing in. Reading Hitchhiker's was the first time I can remember reading a book and being really aware of the craft put into writing it. Wow, I thought, I never knew words could do that! Douglas Adams may not have inspired a love of science fiction in me, but he did spark that lifelong drive to write in a way that is inordinately clever and highly astute, but mostly just very, very silly.

Second: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. This play is very important to me on a number of emotional levels, one of which is that it was my first introduction to the Bard. I was searching for a short speech to recite for school when I was about 11 or 12, and stumbled onto the first half of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. BAM! I was immediately hooked. There was something undefinably delicious about those words, that metre, that left me craving more. I memorised the snippet for my speech (presented complete with masking-tape skull), then decided that the next logical step was to check a copy of the whole play out of the library and memorise that. It took me a very solid effort with the first dozen or so lines over a couple of weeks to realise that this was perhaps a bit too ambitious of me to achieve within the loan period, at which point I just read the rest of it. Half a dozen years later, Hamlet was also my gateway into community theatre, and after that production and a very close study of the play for an Honours paper at university, I eventually managed to memorise most of it, in chunks at least.

Third: the film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and written by William Goldman. This movie was a family favourite when I was growing up, and I watched it so often that I can still recite entire scenes off by heart. It has everything a budding dramatic writer could want to learn from: tight pacing; witty, memorable dialogue; a dream cast to deliver it; lashings of sarcasm (looking at you, Mr Elwes); high stakes; colourful characters; fencing; fighting; torture; revenge; true love; miracles... you get the idea. It was also baby's first introduction to metatextuality, which is a technique I have been frankly obsessed with ever since. I have been told that my dialogue is reminiscient of Oscar Wilde (which I take as the highest of compliments), but in truth I think it might have been William Goldman's screenplay that was the real source.

Now you’ve seen what my biggest literary influences are, but what are yours? Join the conversation; maybe you’ll find someone with the same ones!

Red Pens and Playwriting

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