Writing and Art in General

[C. J., Cool yet firm like ice]

I nearly started a thread about something I thought was interesting but I feel this thread will do just as good!

Another thing I've noticed is what we have read tends to influence heavily a lot of what we put out (write). I started seeing patterns of a lot of my own story for example.

Was reading CJ Box while I was penning a story that took place in a forested place called The Request which was the backdrop to a story with a big twist. The CJ Box series is about a game warden in a heavily vegetated area in Twelve County Sleep.

Another time though I wrote a story about a woman who was trying to get her life together while taking care of her mother with dementia and it was a small subplot in a mystery story that I was reading at that very time.

So many times whatever I was currently reading whether subconscious or not, influenced whatever I was writing or planning on. Has anyone else noticed this happen with their own works through others' at all?

[Garrison]

That's the biggest reason why a common piece of advice for budding authors is to read voraciously. Stephen King even says that authors who don't have the time to read also don't have the time or tools to write a book.

[M]

It’s always tempting to speculate about an author’s hang-ups, based on recurring elements in his poems or stories, but the approaches I’m familiar with are meant primarily to elucidate the poem or story itself, in which case the piece must be examined as something that stands on its own. There are instances (Stevenson’s “Requiem” comes to mind) in which a poem hardly makes sense other than in terms of the life of the author, but they’re uncommon.

The more skilled the writer, of course, the more hazardous it is to draw conclusions about him from what he writes. He has too much control over the material. The beginner, who tends to write spontaneously and uncritically, can’t help but put the workings of his psyche on display in what he writes.

A person who in midlife becomes interested in making sense of himself will be fortunate if he has kept his early poems and stories. As a product largely of the unconscious, they can be a gold mine of information about the writer’s psychological dynamics.