Creativity Frustrations

[myrthman]

I know nothing's new under the sun, but I still strive to be original. Perhaps I should give up that battle and just write.

Anyway, here's my most recent frustration:

When I needed a name for a fantasy country, I used my surroundings for inspiration. I heard an air vent whirring and played with the letters until I was satisfied. It's an anagram and a single letter replacement: Aventyr. I liked it immediately. That was several years ago and I've grown attached to the name, even defined it within my story world and named other locations with a similar convention.

Today, I found on the internet that it's the Swedish word for adventure and close to the Danish word for fairy tale (Eventyr, also found in the works of our Mr. Rzasa), used by Hans Christian Andersen as a title for a collection of ... fairy tales.

I find myself wedged between frustration and reverential awe. Did God guide my letter play? Should I rename one of my major settings or just roll with it? Do you have similar creativity frustrations in your own writing experiences?

[tris]

Oh definitely! It's highly frustrating to have an "original" idea, get halfway through the book, then discover another author has treated the same topic in a similar way. Although the stories are different, I know if I ever try to publish it someone's going to say it's a copy.

On the other hand, there are a lot of writers out there, (George Lucas, for one) who used great words for his characters, places, etc, and later most of us found out he "borrowed" them from another work of literature or language. So I guess it's a matter of can you sell the story and/or live with the rumors that another author "influenced" your writing.

[Resha Caner]

Dec 31, 2012 17:35:26 GMT -5 tris said:

So I guess it's a matter of can you sell the story and/or live with the rumors that another author "influenced" your writing.

There's nothing wrong with influence. Who can avoid it? But plagiarism is definitely bad. Very bad. It's the capital crime of literature.

[myrthman]

After watching kids play and fireworks launch this evening, I think I've mellowed on this particular issue. If I'm enthralled with Andersen's tales, why can't I nod in his direction in my own, even if it is "accidental"? Perhaps providential is a better word. It's almost like a secret wink of approval from Daddy about what I'm doing. And besides, knowing the true origin of the "Valley of Many Waterfalls," I can give glory to God when people criticize or ask about it.

Thanks for reading my vent.

[Kessie]

Nothing is original. But nobody can say it the way you can. There's lots of books about pioneer life in early America. But there's no books like Ralph Moody's Little Britches. It was the night of his 50th birthday, and he'd been taking a writing class. He sat down and wrote a few chapters of his first book and took it to class, and his teacher told him to make it into a book.

The world would be much poorer without Moody's books. Think Little House on the Prairie, except for boys, with cowboys and horses.

[Resha Caner]

Dec 31, 2012 22:56:43 GMT -5 Kessie said:

Think Little House on the Prairie, except for boys, with cowboys and horses.

This is an interesting comment. I could relate several stories of little rebellions I instigated against my teachers. One relates to Little House on the Prairie. My 4th grade teacher once told me she wanted me to read it - not as an assignment for the whole class, just me. When I balked, she said that all of her good students read the books. That settled it for me. From that point on I absolutely refused to read it.

But, my original reason for balking was that I considered it a book for girls. Little Britches sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't recall that I ever actually read it. If my teacher had offered that as an alternative, maybe I would have reacted differently.

Anyway, I always find things like this interesting. I spent my adolescence in the "unisex" 1970s, when suggesting that girls and boys might have different tastes in literature was anathema. For a boy to say something like that would produce responses of "chauvenist pig." So, I still find it refreshing to hear women who have moved on from that.

[firestorm78583]

Even the Little House series had Farmer Boy, the story of Almonzo, Laura's husband. My mom used to read this series to her 5th grade students every year.

[Resha Caner]

Jan 1, 2013 15:11:05 GMT -5 firestorm78583 said:

Even the Little House series had Farmer Boy, the story of Almonzo, Laura's husband. My mom used to read this series to her 5th grade students every year.

Don't take my opinion to be that Little House is bad literature. That's not the issue. Another book in that same category was The Diary of Anne Frank. I hated reading that when I was young. But I've since read it as an adult and absolutely loved it. The girl was a master with words - her age only making it all the more amazing. I guess I've become comfortable in my skin and those things don't threaten me anymore. But as a boy ... yuck!

I wonder if your mom has ever noticed a certain recalitrance amongst many of the boys as she read to the class. Given the the bit of my background that I mentioned earlier, when The War Against Boys was published, I ate it up. There is a theory in literature that one can detect whether a piece was written by a man or a woman. There was even a website that would analyze a text and give an opinion on whether it was written by a man or a woman. Face it. Often times men struggle to write female characters and vice versa. One critique I got started off with: I love your writing. I love the masculine feel of it. But ...

After that I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with writing female characters. I think I've gotten better, but there is still room to improve.

[firestorm78583]

I don't remember mom saying anything about that.

On another thought about nothing new under the Sun, I'm thinking of incorporating Crestron panels into my story. I don't think anyone will accuse me of copying Dean Koontz.

[Kessie]

We bounced that "tell if you write like a guy or a girl" site around in here a while back, I think. (Was it in here or another site?) Anyway, according to the excerpt I submitted, I'm a 50/50 split. Of course, I was also writing about a male protag in a road race who gets in a terrible wreck and rewinds it with the magic he didn't know he had. Not a lot of "feely" words in that.

I'm always on the lookout for male protagonists. They're pretty common in Middle Grade, but non-existent in YA. (I tell you what, I'm so tired of the unpopular girl in high school who meets the hunky dude who is also a werewolf/vampire/fairy/magic user/Clark Kent.)

None of my brothers ever had much problem with the Little House books, but mom read them aloud to us, so it wasn't much of an issue. She also read us Little Britches and Narnia and the billion other read-alouds that go along with the Sonlight curriculum. :-p (I recall Detectives in Togas and Red Sails to Capri with special fondness.)

[Ranger Varon]

-makes note that YA is suffering from a lack of male characters- Perfect! All my MCs are guys, and fall into the YA category.

I've never had anything like that happen to me, but I would keep it since the meaning of the word does actually fit the story.

[rjj7]

I feel your pain. Sometimes I just keep the name, other times I change it. I think it really depends on the context, and that there is no rule regarding how original to be.

I'm currently planning on calling a river in my book the Brandywine, and I just know that Tolkien followers are going to climb out of the woodwork and start praising me for the nod to his work and criticizing me for being unimaginative and stealing ideas.

The worst part isn't that I'm not stealing the name, it's that I'm stealing the name from a completely different source.


[off-topic: The first 5 books in Ralph Moody's autobiographical series are a fondly remembered part of my childhood, and I enjoy rereading them from time to time even as an adult. They have a level of depth and maturity not often found in children's books]

[metalikhan]

Brandywine River (aka Brandywine Creek) is also a real place, a tributary of Christina River, running through SE Pennsylvania.

If I create a word or place name without snagging a version of it from somewhere else and I can show how I came up with it (as you did with Aventyr, myrthman), I go ahead and use it.
I'm more cautious about any names that could be construed as plaigerized. I wouldn't have a character named Duke Skywalker, for example.

You really have to decide on a case by case basis.