{"id":1346,"date":"2012-02-29T06:00:51","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2012-02-29T06:00:51","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T12:00:51","slug":"you-influence-me-you-really-influence-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=1346","title":{"rendered":"You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.<\/p>\n

Television<\/strong> gives me an idea of what works and what doesn\u2019t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it\u2019s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances\u2014in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who\u2019s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.<\/p>\n

Movies<\/strong>, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn\u2019t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.<\/p>\n

Food<\/strong> has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who\u2019s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year\u2019s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year\u2019s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.<\/p>\n

Music<\/strong> is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a quicker way to influence a person\u2019s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It\u2019s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I\u2019m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it\u2019s for belly dancing.<\/p>\n

Art<\/strong> is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.<\/p>\n

For a writer, everything is influential. It\u2019s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn\u2019t have anything to write about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way. Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn\u2019t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[71,429,545,715,724,1122],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influence","tag-art","tag-food","tag-influence","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}