Yesterday, in our interview here, Daniel Abraham said that: “More than [being] readers, writers are thieves.”

Fellow author and friend, Mary Victoria, commented: ” … yes, yes, yes. We use a bit of this and a bit of that. We borrow from each other, from the common store of history and myth. We even raid our own memories … nothing is sacred!”

Of course I had to respond that I preferred the word “magpies” to “thieves” ( 😉 ) but the principle is the same. There was a synergy for me in this discussion, because only the day before I had been at Christchurch’s South library, talking about—amongst other things—influences on my work. Or in other words, about all the treasure trove of ideas, artefacts, and experiences over the years that had caused my magpie self to think: “Shiny!” Or “Bright! Or “Gleamy, and Sheeny, and Glittery!” (I was going to say “sparkly”, but you know, those vampires—just can’t go there.) And then purloin them for my writer’s melting pot—long before I consciously decided to be a writer.

I’ve talked about influences on story before and you can check out the collected posts here. The thievery Daniel Abraham referred to yesterday was of those elements of literature that delight you a reader—and promptly want in your own stories. And as I said in my Influences of Story post on February 3rd, other writing is undoubtedly an influence on any writer’s development. Diving into the vast sargasso sea of literature always sparks ideas and ‘what ifs’, and on February 3 I showed how this process might work using the example of Hilaire Belloc’s poem, Tarantella.

Other sources for magpie gleaning that I mentioned in my library talk included:

• Fairytales, folk stories, myths and legends. By way of example I discussed Thornspell as a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale from the perspective of the prince, and also how I drew on the Parsifal cycle to inform the backdrop of the story. I also spoke of the way in which The Heir of Night was influenced by the classic stories of Greek and Norse myth.

• History—has always informed my work, as in the Renaissance era, Holy Roman Empire influence on the world building in Thornspell, or the way in which Heir draws on history’s social, cultural, and economic conflicts, both within societies as well as between nations.

• The space programme, astronomy, and the environment—all influenced my love of science fiction.

• Narrative Poetry—you just can’t beat it: from those great classics The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the medieval Morte d’Arthur, but also the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the late Middle Ages, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Milton’s Paradise Lost from the early modern period.

• Sense of Place—another influence that I have discussed in two recent posts, here and here, and also last year, here. And of course sense of place also ties into awareness of environment again.

• And then there’s music, dance, opening up the newspaper … And as Mary so rightly pointed out, our own life experiences to be mined if so desired.

Life, the universe and everything, it seems, are a dragon’s hoard, and writers the thieves turning over this gem and that jewel, searching for the elusive Arkenstone …

So how about you? Are there particular writing elements that spin your wheels as a reader? Or that strongly influence you as a writer? Where do you draw your inspiration?