It’s been quite a while since I’ve done an “Influences on Story” post—21 July 2010 in fact—but Tarantella, my Tuesday Poem post for this week, made me think about the influence of other writing in sparking new stories. Tarantella may be a poem, but it still contains stories—and questions a-plenty around those stories.

At first reading, the poem is the story of a dance and an inn in the “High Pyrenees.”  So instantly we have location, in the border country between France and Spain. We also have the dance and the dancer:

” … the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in —
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!”

The language is so evocative that we can see and hear  the dancer moving—“the snapping of the clapper to the spin.” We can also see and hear, smell and feel the scene at the inn:

” … the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)? …

… And the hammer at the doors and the din?”

Doesn’t it just take you there?

Yet the story doesn’t only lie in the colourful and evocative descriptions of dancer and inn. The poem begins with a question:

“Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?”

The question is repeated throughout the first part of the poem and leaves us with our own puzzle, as readers: Who is the narrator? And who is Miranda? What is their relationship to each other? What were they doing at this rough inn in the High Pyrenees?

If we have a storyteller in us, we will want to answer those questions—and the appetite to first speculate and then spin answers is sharpened by the second part of the poem, which begins with the lines:

“Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.”

We learn that the inn and the dancer and the muleteers, and all those who created a din and hammered at the doors, are gone:

“Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound …

… No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.”

Why? As readers, we wonder: Why are the inn and the people all gone? Why does  only a powerful and isolate nature remain? Given the location, and the life span of the poet, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), my first guess was that the story might have had something to do with the Spanish Civil War, which was savage and bloody and swept many communities away. But the publication date for the poem is 1930, predating the Civil War of 1936-1939, so an easy historical answer is not forthcoming. And poetry, like the novel and short stories, is often completely fictional. Yet still the questions persist: What is the narrator and Miranda’s story? What happened to the inn and the people in it, and why?

The moment, lacking “real” answers, that we begin to weave imagined answers into story we are spinning a new thread into the fiction web, one which may—and likely will—be profoundly different from whatever was in Belloc’s mind when he wrote Tarantella, for example. But I believe it is a truth worthy of “universal acknowlegment” that every time we read a book, or  a poem, or a short story, and feel a “but what if” sparked, that spark has a profound influence on our own stories.

In its most immediate from, this influence becomes fan fiction, but often we recognize the “spark” in stories that are decidedly their own fiction. “What if”, for example, Arwen could have married Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and not become mortal? In David Eddings’ Belgariad series we find an immortal woman who believes that she must and will lose her immortality if she marries her mortal love—but finds, to her considerable surprise, that he is raised to immortality instead. Most of us who have read The Lord of the Rings appreciate the irony, without ever mistaking one story for the other.

The sheer number of retellings of the King Arthur cycle and The Illiad and The Odyssey stories—and more recently Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, which is an alternate take on the Aeneid—are an enduring testament to the power of one story to influence and shape others. My own Thornspell is just such shaping, seeking to answer the “what if” of the prince’s backstory in the traditional Sleeping Beauty—and the “why” behind both his actions and those of the wicked fairy.

So what do you think? Do you have a favourite spin-off of an old story? Or is there a “what if” or “why” from a novel, or short story, or poem, that you would like to see addressed through new fiction?