{"id":34718,"date":"2019-06-17T08:44:50","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T12:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=34718"},"modified":"2022-01-09T21:55:30","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T02:55:30","slug":"michael-moreci-writing-under-the-influence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2019\/06\/17\/michael-moreci-writing-under-the-influence\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Moreci: Writing Under the Influence"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, I read an interview from David Foster Wallace, and in it he talked about how writers are told to write what they know and what that means. He\u2019d been taking a little bit of flak, apparently, for his reliance on modern\/pop culture and its ephemera in his opus novel, Infinite Jest<\/em>. Long story short, but Wallace said that his hyper-referential writing style was a product of his experiences. Like most of us, Wallace grew up on TV and video games and paperback novels. That\u2019s the tapestry of our lives, just like the tapestry of Emerson\u2019s life, or Thoreau\u2019s life, was the naturalistic world. Atari and Saturday matinees, Wallace said, were his Walden Pond, and his writing couldn\u2019t be anything other than a reflection of his experiences.<\/p>\n

The thing is, we\u2019re living in a weird time, creatively. Our world isn\u2019t Emerson\u2019s world; we\u2019re smothered in information and art\u2014through social media, through nonstop streaming options, wildly accessible entertainment, so on and so forth. In a sense, we\u2019re influenced by influence. Let me give you an example:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written two novels\u2014Black Star Renegades<\/a> <\/em>and its sequel, We Are Mayhem<\/a><\/em>\u2014and I like to sometimes joke that they\u2019re just Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. Now, like any joke, there\u2019s some truth to this: The story is very, very much inspired by Star Wars. I\u2019m a Star Wars fanatic. Thinking in Wallace\u2019s terms, if you look at the tapestry of my life, it\u2019s Star Wars, Stephen King, John Carpenter, and a whole bunch of comic books. And I was lucky to grow up in a house that supplied me with all these things, and from a very young age. My parents were not only supportive of my weird interests, but they were also liberal about my entertainment intake. I watched Halloween<\/em> when I was five years old; I saw A New Hope<\/em> when I was four. And my mom, bless her, used what little extra money she had to get me comic books and paperback novels from garage sales whenever she could. I was never short on supply when it came to absorbing pop culture, and that absorption was (and still is) a big part of my life.<\/p>\n

Getting back to Black Star Renegades<\/em>, there\u2019s no way I could deny that it wasn\u2019t influenced by Star Wars (Lucasfilm, in fact, has hired me since, and I\u2019m currently writing many of the all-ages Star Wars Adventures<\/em> comic stories). I embrace that fact, fully\u2014Black Star Renegades <\/em>wouldn\u2019t exist without Star Wars. But, there\u2019s two things to say about this.<\/p>\n

First, like I said before, we\u2019re influenced by influence. Yes, you can jab at me for being so apparent with my influences, but Star Wars is also a sum of its influences. From classic sci-fi pulps to Kurosawa movies to silent films and a whole bunch of other stuff in-between, George Lucas\u2019s space opera opus was the sum of many parts\u2014all the things that influenced him<\/em>. And all those <\/em>things can then be traced back to various influences as well. This isn\u2019t a groundbreaking revelation, of course; what\u2019s important, though, is allowing your creative self to be okay carrying forth the DNA of other works. I\u2019ve seen so many stories from talented writers wither on the vine because they were concerned with how much their work echoed things that have already been made. Solomon said there\u2019s nothing new under the sun, and in my opinion that\u2019s true (to a degree\u2014if you dropped Solomon into our world, I\u2019m sure he\u2019d say \u201cHoly shit! Look at all these new things under the sun!\u201d). It\u2019s so remarkably rare\u2014like one in a million\u2014to create something that\u2019s nothing like anything else. We know it when we see it, and these rare instances are cherished, as they should be. And while striving for that is a noble pursuit, it\u2019s also\u2014and I\u2019ve seen this with my own two eyes\u2014the path to creative madness.<\/p>\n

Of course, though, we can\u2019t just go ripping off the things we love. That\u2019s why I\u2019m comfortable saying Black Star Renegades <\/em>is a Star Wars knock-off\u2014I know, in reality, it\u2019s not. Here\u2019s where the important trick comes in, a trick I\u2019ve learned writing not only these two novels, but many, many licensed comic books.<\/p>\n

So, as a comic book writer, I\u2019m oftentimes asked to write stories for existing characters. I\u2019ve written Superman, The Shadow, Cassie Hack, Adam West Batman, Nightwing, and more. And the thing I\u2019ve learned in telling these stories successfully is this: You have to embrace the stories and their traditions for what they are. Nightwing is a sexy, fun version of Batman. That\u2019s it. Therefore, when writing a Nightwing story, it wouldn\u2019t really work to make him dark and tortured like Bruce Wayne\u2014that\u2019s not who he is. The job in writing for Nightwing is to write a story about a young, sexy dude who fights crime. But that\u2019s only part of the puzzle. The other part, the most important <\/em>part, is finding a way to embrace the core thing and make it your own. That\u2019s the key. At the end of the day, the Nightwing story has to be a story that only I can tell\u2014it\u2019s my voice, it\u2019s my point of view that the story is filtered through. Yes, I am embrace Nightwing completely\u2014but I balance that with filtering everything he is through my own POV.<\/p>\n

The thing is, the same goes for original creations. It\u2019s the same balance of embracing your influences while maintaining your own voice. If you want to tell an epic fantasy but feel like it\u2019s too much like Robert Jordan, remember that it\u2019s you <\/em>telling the story in your unique way. And the more you write, and the more your story takes shape, I\u2019m confident that it\u2019ll sounds less and less like Wheel of Time <\/em>and more like your own thing. The same thing exists in Black Star Renegades<\/em>. The Star Wars DNA is all over that book, but so is my DNA. There\u2019s a lot of love for the galaxy far, far away in those pages, but there\u2019s also a deconstruction of the messiah complex, and that dominant aspect of the book is all me. That\u2019s my voice coming through, and it\u2019s what makes that story what it is, and not just a Star Wars rip-off.<\/p>\n

Now, this isn\u2019t an endorsement of plagiarism\u2014that would be bad. But we live in a world of influence that\u2019s been influenced from other influence. There\u2019s nothing wrong, in my opinion, owning it and making it your own.<\/p>\n

Michael Moreci: Website<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

We Are Mayhem: Print<\/a> | eBook<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, I read an interview from David Foster Wallace, and in it he talked about how writers are told to write what they know and what that means. He\u2019d been taking a little bit of flak, apparently, for his reliance on modern\/pop culture and its ephemera in his opus novel, Infinite Jest. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-34718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-91Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34718"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34722,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34718\/revisions\/34722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}