Novel Thoughts: What Inspired You to Create?
Greetings, friends! It’s been a long time since we updated our blog here, and we’re going to take the opportunity of the new year to start fresh with a new series here on the site- Novel Thoughts. Once a month, our team will share their thoughts about what drives them to create, what we’re passionate about, and how we all got here at Blackwarren. Hopefully we leave you with a few fun insights and more reasons to read and explore. This month’s prompt was “What Inspired You to Create?” with contributions from Vaughn R. Demont, Managing Editor, Renard De Fleureaux, Senior Editor, Lu, Beta Reader and Assistant Editor, and Skye Sisk, editor.
Vaughn, Managing Editor-
There are a lot of works of literature out there that bother aspiring and prolific writers can point to and say, “This was the one, this was the book where I caught the bug.” I was a rather avid reader when I was young, but that rode primarily on Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program that rewarded me with a personal pan pizza in exchange for reading a dozen books that would be signed on by my Mom and my teacher. It was always a small triumph when I got my pizza, and I wasn’t thinking about reading when it was placed in front of me, I was just thrilled I would order pizza with no cheese, and sausage as a topping.
And I’m certain (for those who remember it, and get a touch of nostalgia) that the “Book It!” program inspired a great many writers, many of whom I would say without question are better writers than I. I have memories of reading Where the Red Fern Grows, and the ValueTales series that my parents picked up for my sister and I that had talking axes and sneakers and stars. What inspired me to become a writer, however, was something else entirely.
It's not a book you can find anywhere, it wasn’t bound or published, and it was typed on a Smith-Corona, and “bound” all 54 pages, with a hole puncher and a plastic spine at my elementary school where my Mom volunteered in the office.
What anyone would tell you first about my Mom is that she was a fan of the classic Western TV show Rawhide, which is primarily known for giving America Clint Eastwood, as he played the character Rowdy Yates, and would parley that into the spaghetti Westerns that made him an icon. My mother had precisely zero interest in Clint Eastwood, she’d had a crush on the lead actor, Eric Fleming, for years. This crush would be called an obsession by her ex-husbands, but having lived through it, I wouldn’t agree.
My inspiration to write came from my mother’s love of Rawhide, because she took it upon herself one day to begin researching the actor, his life, early life and career, circumstances of his death, his family, and worked on it for several months. I would see her at her typewriter, constantly looking to whatever article she was quoting, checking her outline, and muttering “son of a bitch…” when she’d made an error, and had to retype the whole page again.
She was happy, though, and she read to me out loud, and I was able to follow the throughline of the life of the man that had taken so much of her attention. I asked about getting a book about Eric Fleming at the library, “There aren’t any,” was the response. She didn’t see it, so she decided to do it herself. She never sent it to anyone, only for herself, and me when I asked her to read it. She chose to write something that made her happy, something that she couldn’t find on her own, not for anyone’s approval but her own.
It would take a bit of therapy and a several year writer’s block for me to realize that simple truth: write what you want, write what makes you happy, and never, ever, apologize. Thank you for inspiring me, Mom.
Lu, Assistant Editor-
Collaborative artmaking fuels me. The majority of my creations found finality only through the input and influence of others, and I’ve always found it easiest to work when I have people to bounce off of. The genesis of this drive can only be two pieces: Poe’s album Haunted and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves.
I found Haunted first, already a Poe fan from her debut, Hello. Haunted finds Poe (aka Annie Danielewski) exploring her father’s life after his death. Tad Danielewski was a filmmaker and documentarian, and the album is peppered with audio clips of him speaking to Poe, to his family, to no one in particular. Tad is so imperative to the album that the opening track features Poe singing “para Papa”, Spanish for “for dad”. Poe’s mixture of trip-hop and progressive pop cultivate a dimly-lit, warm, melancholy mood that is unmissable even in the most joyous track. By the end, the song “If You Were Here” aches, slow and reverent, wishing for her father to see all she’s done since he died. The intertwining of Tad’s work and Poe’s unpacked feelings do gangbusters to depict a complicated but ultimately cherished father-daughter relationship. I went years thinking this album was a stunning work by itself, until I learned that her brother wrote a post-modern horror novel that Haunted references regularly. I was immediately sold.
House of Leaves, in short, is about a house that refuses spatial reality and the people compelled to comprehend it. We experience this story at three levels: one, the story of Navidson, his family, and Navidson’s documentary crew contending with their unknowable house; two, a writer named Zampanò’s non-fiction book about Navidson’s documentary; three, Johnny Truant, the man who finds the dead Zampanò’s manuscript. Over the novel, all three stories crack open to explore madness, loss, the unknown, and how even good relationships can break under the right tensions.
What spoke to me most, though, was that these two sibling artists made their respective works in tandem with each other. Haunted is not a soundtrack for House of Leaves, nor vice versa. Instead, they become companion works that complicate and add extra specificity to the individual pieces. Characters (like Johnny Truant) blend across the two; so do concepts like the 5 1/2 minute hallway. At one point, between songs on Haunted, a small voice whispers in repetition, “maybe it’s a house of leaves”. Most potent, though, is the intertwined feeling of confounded devastation. Poe and Mark are both processing the death of their father, and in doing so, end up holding each others’ hand through words and music. Both works underline the collaborative nature of creativity within their own texts, with Tad Danielewski being so present in one and the trifold storytelling of the other. The horror of both Haunted and House of Leaves is a horror of being left guideless, rudderless, floating in an emotional void. Even after his death, the Danielewski patriarch is collaborating with his children, being the catalyst for emotional catharsis. It is not impossible to experience one of these artworks in isolation, I did it for years. Yet, I know for certain I got even more out of one by experiencing the other. They are unique works in their own right, but together they complement and enhance the texture of the other.
Writing can feel like a mental hermitage, hiding away with your own thoughts and conscripting them into a story. We are all familiar with the tortured author, the isolate creator who emerges from their cave every so often to drop a manuscript on an editor’s desk. We also know that no artist needs to be tortured, that no artist needs to be an island. Opening that solitary pursuit up might feel scary at first, but inevitably grows richer gardens. Whether collaborating on a single story or a whole world, remember that our world is built by many hands. Art is no different, and I’m glad the Danielewskis taught me that early.
Renard De Fleureaux, Senior Editor-
I have always loved being a storyteller, and it's something I got from my dad. Every night when he was home, he'd tell me a story; if it wasn't a colorful tale from his own life, then he would read me something. I was introduced to a lot of great books through him that, looking back, really colored my personal tastes later in life- Tolkien's The Hobbit, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, The Odyssey, and so many more classics, but the one that fired my imagination like nothing else was C.S. Lewis' own The Chronicles of Narnia.
Like any high fantasy fan worth his salt, I have regularly drunk from the well that Professor Tolkien excavated. His Legendarium is a masterpiece in worldbuilding and modern day mythmaking, but Tolkien's friend and colleague Lewis, honestly, looked like he was having more fun. Narnia and its environs puts me in mind of a D&D group's homebrew setting, where everyone got to throw in anything and everything they liked. Do you like mixing together every single fantasy creature in the same setting, from dwarves and werewolves to pegasi, minotaurs, and phoenixes? Lewis has got you. Do you like seeing the entire history of the setting, literally from the moment of its creation to the esoteric ending? Lewis has got you. Do you like expansions of the world, covering underwater kingdoms, living stars, and uncomfortably outdated orientalist stereotypes? Lewis has got you.
It may come as no surprise, since I was so enamored with Narnia, that I was raised in a Christian household, and remain committed to the faith. Growing up as a Christian kid in 90's suburbia, however, meant that my choices for quality, faith-based content was slim on the ground, basically a choice between Veggietales and Narnia. That didn't stop my mom and Sunday school teachers from inundating me with a lot of faith-based TV shows, but Bibleman was hardly going to inspire the next great American novel. In the pages of the Narnia books, however, Lewis' talent marries a sincere, whimsical voice with the religious scholarship that color most of Lewis' other works. In that simple act, Narnia did something that no other Church-approved show or book did- it challenged my faith.
The Narnia books are notorious for their allegorical nature towards large aspects of Christianity, from Aslan essentially being Jesus' fursona to The Last Battle being a step-by-step guide to the Book of Revelation. In clumsier hands, we all know what this can look like; just take a gander at the latest offerings from Pureflix. In Lewis' writing, he knew he wasn't just preaching to the choir. He challenges not just children, but adults as well, to think through their morals and ethics. It was the first time I was confronted with faith being something more than just believing in something even when there's no evidence for it. It taught me to be forgiving to people, to give them second chances, in the form of characters like Edmund and Eustace. It taught me to be open-minded, to trust that good people can come from anywhere, even if they don't belong to my family's faith, political leanings, or general philosophy, like the Calormen Soldier or Aravis.
Despite being championed by modern day Right-Wing Christendom, the Narnia books run perpendicular to that narrow mindset. They not only introduced me to a colorful world that fired my imagination, it gave me the knowledge and courage to approach my faith and beliefs on my own terms, and go beyond merely parroting what my parents and pastor told me. It made me curious, and led to all of my great passions in life- my love of history, fantasy, mythmaking, writing, and all the rest. For a genre so notorious for being caught in Tolkien's shadow, The Chronicles of Narnia showed from the very start that the realm of fantasy has limitless borders.
Skye Sisk, Editor-
I was homeschooled for the latter half of elementary school (thanks, untreated ADHD), and right when we started, there was all this buzz in the news, in literary groups & in homeschooling circles, of a hot new fantasy book written by a homeschooled teenager. I won’t argue Eragon is actually the greatest book ever, or even particularly well-written; as an adult I understand that the Paolinis owning a print house helped get the book to Knopf more than any merit of the book itself. But as a homeschooled kid obsessed with dragons and wizards, a kid who would play knights in the woods and then run home and type up stories about those adventures, the idea that I could do it too was electric. Now, looking at the book twenty-something years later & from an editor’s lens, I admire the way the sequels contend with the mistakes the first book made – Elva and Nar Garzhvog stand out as narrative payoff done right, and build on and criticize the tropes Eragon cobbled together from popular culture. Plus, a setting where language is literally magic has a special allure to someone who lives and breathes books.
