inspiration and flawed fiction

[marycatelli]

Ripping off other people's stories is a classic way to get ideas.

On the whole, I've found that bad, or at least flawed, fiction is the ideal source.  Good fiction, you can see the idea in action just by re-reading it.  Bad fiction, the only way you can see the idea hopping through flaming hoops with more grace than a tiger is to make it do so yourself.

(Well, usually.  Sometimes a throw-away idea is used as background, or a lie, or something, in good fiction and you can steal it and bring it to the foreground and so have a story.)

But not always.  I was reflecting on Andre Norton's Forerunner Foray.  There are two major things I noticed reading it as an adult that I missed as an adolescent.  One was that the heroine and hero traipsed around in history without the slightest concern about whether they were affecting the future, or the well-being of the aliens and their civilization -- and given their status, they threw a real monkey wrench in there.  And I played around with that and have a story about lords and loyalty and death.  Also, the heroine's big motive was to Get Her Hands on an Alien Artifact.  It obsesses her.  Her boss thinks it's good treasure, another psyker thinks it's a valuable artifact. . . and no one thinks maybe this demonstrably powerful thing has an agenda of its own.  Which idea sits on its own and does not sprout a story. . . .

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Yah, but he DID find it earlier.  That's what I thought was either goofy or endearing - “future shock” is simply not a problem. Things in Middle Earth take a very long time to mature.

This is why the Elves were horrified when they encountered Men - where they came from, if fifty years went by between Step 1 and Step 2 of a plan, so what? Fifty minutes, fifty seconds, fifty years, comme ci, comme ca… Now they so much as turn around and sneeze, and turn back to find “Son of” standing in for the guy they'd just been talking to…

[To the Elves, all Men were like the Ray Bradbury story, “Fire and Ice,” where people aged out their entire lives in just seven days. “Now, wait a minute…”]

So, yah, Bilbo went on his adventure, returned to the Shire, and, what was it, thirty-odd years then passed (from WWII to Watergate). The Birthday Party happens, Gandalf ducks out to do some quick research, and eleven more years pass before he returns! (Numbers approximate. It might have been seventeen years - from Apollo 11 to Challenger.)

I mean, never mind traveling to Mordor - Frodo could have built the road himself. La, di da di dum…

I wonder to what extent this glacial velocity (and corresponding redwood lifespans) was Tolkien's rebellion against the madly accelerating 20th century.

[marycatelli]

The Necromancer was already arising in The Hobbit, even though there he was an obvious excuse for Gandalf to leave. Imagine what if we could know that the Necromancer would return without the destruction of the Ring -- in, say, three or four centuries.

And your main characters are not elves.