When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps, like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat. I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games (Castlevania ftw) and movies (Hook).
By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech to go along with the role playing game I dabbled in with my neighbor friend, as well as a steady diet of Spider-Man novels and comic books.
Once I hit the midpoint of high school, I discovered Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, and I became hooked on epic fantasy. While I still like Goodkind's world and writing (particularly the first couple of books, before Richard became Superman-but-with-headaches), I'm not as large a fan of his world, having become fatigued of his objectivism and the lack of permanent stakes--in much the same way that Superman isn't usually a compelling character, because there's nothing he can't fix. Still, Richard Rahl and his wife, Kahlan were the inspirations for my earliest forays into fantasy writing of my own. Since then, I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, the Kingkiller Chronicles, and the best offerings of Brandon Sanderson.
Thanks to being an English major, however, my shelves aren't exclusively burdened with science-fiction and fantasy (more the latter than the former, but there's always a steady interest in stories in the stars). I have some classics, as well as some that are Good Books (I'm thinking mostly of The Remains of the Day and Life of Pi and The Ladies' Auxiliary), though I don't think I'll be likely to reread any of them.
After getting my teaching job, I found a great deal of pleasure in expanding my understanding of philosophy through the Pop Culture and Philosophy books, my personal favorites being Batman and Philosophy, Watchmen and Philosophy, and Jurassic Park and Philosophy. These are a sweet/sour mix of a read--the pop culture that I love as the sweet, the sour being the sometimes-a-stretch philosophy applied to it--that have helped me understand philosophy (and pop culture) better.
Whilst in college, I read a lot of mind-bending and -numbing texts, so I have those still, plus others that are as dense as a neutron star. My personal favorite is Gamer Theory, which is a slim volume that puts an intense analysis of what video games look like deconstructed. It was the inspiration for a lot of the early video game essays on this blog.
As my teaching skills increased and I shuddered at the paucity of knowledge that I have, I tried to staunch that intellectual wound by acquiring more history books, which though they occupy a small section of my Fortress of Solitude, they nathless are an important addition.
Shakespeare and his spiritual son, Milton, eat up nearly an entire bookshelf on their own, with copies of the plays/poems and books relating to their time period as flourishes and embellishments. These I reference sporadically, though many of them I've read through in their entirety, including The Milton Encyclopedia, which, though it took me two years, I did completely read. On this shelf are the true classics, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy. Though I have a great many books--and have read, I like to think, the majority of them--this is the section that I feel is the Most Important, even if it isn't the one that inspired me to become an aspiring writer.
What I have very little of, however, is horror. A handful of zombie stories (Resident Evil novelizations, huzzah), a couple of Lovecraft books, and that's about it. So it's weird that, despite the width which I've read (comparatively small, I know, but it's the best I can do), I am currently sketching outlines and characters for a horror novel, lightly based/inspired by Beowulf.
See, each novel that I set out to write is selected for two reasons: One, I'm passionate and excited about it, and two, it's different than anything I've done before. For example, I wanted to write a novel that was a science-fiction/thriller designed as a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno. I wrote that for NaNoWriMo a couple years back. Once, I wanted to write a sprawling epic with a magic system based upon everyone's least favorite unit in English class: Poetry. It took the better part of four years, but I did that. I created a world with a unique (I think) magic system, then wrote a spiritual sequel on a completely different part of that world, forcing myself to think of the magic in a different way. In each case, I wanted to try something new.
But why am I thinking of writing a horror novel? That I can't say, save that horror is on my mind a little/lot lately. I'm also poking steadily at the realistic novel that's been floating around for the better part of a year. I'm nine chapters in, which puts the word total at something approaching 20,000 words--which is a pretty big commitment to a story that has no outline, no plot, no clear vision or picture.
So I'm doing what I try to make my students do in class, and something that can be satisfying and enjoyable and painful and even a little bit dangerous: I'm stretching.
By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech to go along with the role playing game I dabbled in with my neighbor friend, as well as a steady diet of Spider-Man novels and comic books.
Once I hit the midpoint of high school, I discovered Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, and I became hooked on epic fantasy. While I still like Goodkind's world and writing (particularly the first couple of books, before Richard became Superman-but-with-headaches), I'm not as large a fan of his world, having become fatigued of his objectivism and the lack of permanent stakes--in much the same way that Superman isn't usually a compelling character, because there's nothing he can't fix. Still, Richard Rahl and his wife, Kahlan were the inspirations for my earliest forays into fantasy writing of my own. Since then, I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, the Kingkiller Chronicles, and the best offerings of Brandon Sanderson.
Thanks to being an English major, however, my shelves aren't exclusively burdened with science-fiction and fantasy (more the latter than the former, but there's always a steady interest in stories in the stars). I have some classics, as well as some that are Good Books (I'm thinking mostly of The Remains of the Day and Life of Pi and The Ladies' Auxiliary), though I don't think I'll be likely to reread any of them.
After getting my teaching job, I found a great deal of pleasure in expanding my understanding of philosophy through the Pop Culture and Philosophy books, my personal favorites being Batman and Philosophy, Watchmen and Philosophy, and Jurassic Park and Philosophy. These are a sweet/sour mix of a read--the pop culture that I love as the sweet, the sour being the sometimes-a-stretch philosophy applied to it--that have helped me understand philosophy (and pop culture) better.
Whilst in college, I read a lot of mind-bending and -numbing texts, so I have those still, plus others that are as dense as a neutron star. My personal favorite is Gamer Theory, which is a slim volume that puts an intense analysis of what video games look like deconstructed. It was the inspiration for a lot of the early video game essays on this blog.
As my teaching skills increased and I shuddered at the paucity of knowledge that I have, I tried to staunch that intellectual wound by acquiring more history books, which though they occupy a small section of my Fortress of Solitude, they nathless are an important addition.
Shakespeare and his spiritual son, Milton, eat up nearly an entire bookshelf on their own, with copies of the plays/poems and books relating to their time period as flourishes and embellishments. These I reference sporadically, though many of them I've read through in their entirety, including The Milton Encyclopedia, which, though it took me two years, I did completely read. On this shelf are the true classics, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy. Though I have a great many books--and have read, I like to think, the majority of them--this is the section that I feel is the Most Important, even if it isn't the one that inspired me to become an aspiring writer.
What I have very little of, however, is horror. A handful of zombie stories (Resident Evil novelizations, huzzah), a couple of Lovecraft books, and that's about it. So it's weird that, despite the width which I've read (comparatively small, I know, but it's the best I can do), I am currently sketching outlines and characters for a horror novel, lightly based/inspired by Beowulf.
See, each novel that I set out to write is selected for two reasons: One, I'm passionate and excited about it, and two, it's different than anything I've done before. For example, I wanted to write a novel that was a science-fiction/thriller designed as a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno. I wrote that for NaNoWriMo a couple years back. Once, I wanted to write a sprawling epic with a magic system based upon everyone's least favorite unit in English class: Poetry. It took the better part of four years, but I did that. I created a world with a unique (I think) magic system, then wrote a spiritual sequel on a completely different part of that world, forcing myself to think of the magic in a different way. In each case, I wanted to try something new.
But why am I thinking of writing a horror novel? That I can't say, save that horror is on my mind a little/lot lately. I'm also poking steadily at the realistic novel that's been floating around for the better part of a year. I'm nine chapters in, which puts the word total at something approaching 20,000 words--which is a pretty big commitment to a story that has no outline, no plot, no clear vision or picture.
So I'm doing what I try to make my students do in class, and something that can be satisfying and enjoyable and painful and even a little bit dangerous: I'm stretching.