#how many times do I have to be reminded that robin hobb wrote a great romantic drama arc for them

[spectrum-color]

Following so many people reading or rereading RotE is amazing but it’s meant that they all get to Fools Fate eventually and I have to keep experiencing my least favorite ending of any book ever over and over again it is destroying my sanity

[not-poignant]

Pia, you are such a good writer. Do you have any books or fanworks (or other writers) that you take inspiration from? I used to copy phrases of 'interview with a vampire' so I could get a feel of how the prose worked, so I'm curious to know where you aquired such amazing skill. (and how i can get in on some of that action 👌)

Hiya anon!

I’m not sure I’m a good writer, but I’m glad you enjoy the writing! I still have so much to learn. So much, heh.

Nothing too specific, like I never went through a phase of copying phrases for example? But at university we sometimes had to write things in the style of someone else, so I’ve definitely done it for like...assignments. Just not privately.

By the time I was about 13 years old, I’d easily already read about 500 books (like, books with no pictures, lol), and by the time I was 18 that number was somewhere around 2,000. I had favourite authors, for sure, but there were so many at that point, that I no longer had specific prose styles I wanted to copy.

Like I remember I really wanted the childhood anguish I felt while reading The Monster Garden by Vivien Alcock (that fucked me up), but I know there were at least 15 other books I loved and adored and wanted to sink myself into. I don’t remember what they were now. And also like, TV and film? I wanted to write the feeling of watching The Last Unicorn as a child. I wanted dialogue that could be snappy and fast like what I saw in Press Gang (*sighs at Moffat these days*).

And that was like, as a young teenager. From there I just added and added to it. Like, okay, for example, in my study where I write - I have prints up on the wall. I look at them for motivation more than I’d ever read a favourite author before writing (the latter I think can pollute the integrity of my work these days, which isn’t to say it’s bad to write like them, it’s that these days I want to write like me). So I look at these prints. I have a ship in a sky to make me remember whimsy. I have a forest filled with moss to remember cool places, a whole lot of trees that make a gateway into a green sacred space that remind me of the Seelie and Unseelie Court, a lone house in the fog by a single tree, because I always want to imagine who lives there, a raven-woman, with a shaggy crest of multi-coloured feathers to remember shapesfhiting and magic, I have a fox lurking at night, a waterhorse-unicorn, a white raven soaring towards a golden moon, a phoenix-firebird, a sea-dragon.

That’s just some of it. I suppose because I need to evoke visual things in my brain before I can write.

I’ve cited clear influences for some things. Like I’ve said that Augus is somewhat an homage to Laurent from Captive Prince, which I’ve said since the beginning. But Augus isn’t a true strategist like Laurent, I still wanted him to be his own character. Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy in particular has helped me remember to anchor epic scope stories down into very real, small details - finding food and eating, getting dressed, sorting out the minutiae of the day to day. But I haven’t reread that trilogy in over 7 years. Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s Bitterbynde Trilogy is a huge influence (I highly recommend it, start with The Ill-Made Mute) because of the way she uses syncretism in her worldbuilding, with Australian native plants and animals found alongside characters like the Raven King and the Each Uisge (no really, it’s a strong influence, lol).

I don’t know how I got to where I got to. There’s really only two things that stand out: I consume creative content hugely, across a broad, broad sprectrum (music, movies, TV, plays, scripts, poetry, books - novels, short stories, fanfiction, art, sculpture), and I’ve written a huge amount. Like not-poignant wasn’t my first attempt at writing fanfiction, I’ve written over 300,000 words under another name, and I used to write privately before that.

And I’m sure if all of you privately wrote some 500,000 words, you’d all be really great writers (and probably a lot better than me!)

(And to be honest there are people who don’t even need to write that much to achieve that lol). 

I feel like I’m missing out on so many influences. But I am. How to describe that I want to capture in words that train scene from Spirited Away? Or that I want the first time I had Scottish poetry read to me in lunchlines to be the feeling I convey when I write about cold, rocky landscapes?

And this is just skipping out on fanworks entirely. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’ve read well over 10,000 fanfics, I don’t know how much fanart I’ve looked at. I have writers I love, but I’m not sure how much they influence me. A lot of the time I love things I can’t do, or don’t want to do, or don’t want to do like that. Like, porn done in brevity? Great skill! I find it boring as a writer, and interesting as a reader, lol.

Long sex scenes have definitely come from fanfiction though. Not just specific authors, but this global sense that it’s just okay and won’t ruin your story structure, worldbuilding or pacing to sometimes spend 10,000 words on a physically intimate scene that can contain characterisation, growth and so on. Fanfic taught me that. But which ones? Idk. I have a vague sense that Harry Potter and Thorki fandoms were the two biggest contributors to that concept. But I like over 100 authors who all do that in both fandoms.

Tl;dr - there’s no secret. Read a lot. Write a lot. Everyone will get better if they do that.