Launch or Be Lunch, Day 16 – Inspiration is Where You Get It (or Something Like That)

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Ah, insipiration, that fickle inspiring inspirative that inspires inspiration.  Yeah, whatever.

The fact is, most of us tend to get our inspiration from what we're exposed to the most.  If you read books, books are your inspiration.  If you watch TV, you get it there.  If you're a cinephile, most of your works will have a cinematic quality.  If you're an otaku, guess what?

Well, I'm here to give you yet another bit of information that will likely annoy the crap out of you and earn me yet more hatred and contempt (just performing a public service, folks!) from all my potential fans.

Stop.  Stop what you're doing now and Get Your Own Damn Idea.

 Cant-have-a-pony

Several years ago I wrote an essay by that very title, as a warning to fanfiction writers to go farther and merely stop parroting their favorite anime of the past, because at best you might get a pastiche; at worst, you're going to do an unintentional plagiarism:

After all, this is original fiction. This is not a bunch of characters extrapolated and interpreted by you, this is a bunch of characters created and designed by you. This is your world. You are God here. And because this is The Gospel According to (Fill In The Blank Here), your world shouldn't look as though you're barely west of Rumiko Takahashi or Tachueki Naoko or what have you. Can you create something similar? Yes, that's homage. Should you create something that is so similar to their works that it merely appears that you've taken known anime characters and shoved them in the Witness Protection Program? No. Original works mean just that – original. So let's hop to getting at that original work, and to begin with, we're going to take the above idea and dissect it.

Now I'm standing here telling all of you the same thing.  Don't tie your work to your inspirations.  If you story is about a Boy Wizard, it's probably not best that he be a tousle-haired boy with a scar and thick round glasses on his face.  If your space war involves a gritty band of rebels against an oppressive space empire, the emblem of that tyranny is not recommended to be an imposing cyborg in black.  if your city is in desperate need of a hero, its humanlike alien protector should not likely be a man with a blue spandex outfit, red cape and an S-shield on his chest.

Thinking-cap1

In short: go elsewhere for your inspiration. 

For example, if you read the other day's article, we pointed out all of the other stories/media franchises/etc. that Claude & Monet bear a similarity to.  But the thing is that we spent years – yes, years - researching and going over various sources so it wouldn't be compared to any particular series.  Yes, we watched Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Leon: the Professional and all the related works, but we didn't just stop there.  We took design cues from Bioshock (in our universe, one of the design/fashion phases was an art deco revival).  Ayne studied Charles Mackintosh, Roman de Tirtoff (better known as Erte), Frank Lloyd Wright, and others.  I took the time to study various crime, caper and military stories.  Perhaps even more vitally, we looked at the related materials that we loved and decided we wouldn't go there; that moving in that direction might cause problems if not outright headaches.   

We also took inspiration from music and lyrics – seriously.  Our characters have distinct tastes in music (Monet, for example, has a preference for "classical soul", aka 1960s Motown).  Led Zeppelin and its mythos is a running joke throughout the series (that is a spoiler – you have been warned).  Thomas Dolby's first album, The Golden Age of Wireless, has a significant inspiration on the second story arc of the series (though not in the way you expect).  And that's not all.  Ayne, a major fan of Alan Parsons, tells me about all the visual jokes she plans to weave in.  Also a fan of Fate/Stay Night, she'll probably play a game of "find the hidden Excaliburs!" with the audience.  These are all things that inform and impact our work, and have nothing to do with stories similar to ours.

It has been said that ultimately, it's what you bring to the story that counts more than originality.  While that is very true, it's also a matter of where you go beyond what your basic tropes are.  Cowboys & Aliens did a very good job of this.  So did A Knight's Tale, which merged medivael storytelling with a stadium sports feel.  Dark City merged noir and sci-fi.  Bioshock was more a study of objectivism than a pretty art deco shooter; its sequel did the same to collectivism more than another "me too" romp through the ruins of Rapture.  You can pick any example of a media: television, films, music, and there are probably examples where the creator of a successful work took a look at his contemporaries' efforts and decided it was time to go beyond.

Case in point: the webcomic Adastrus.  Giant robots are rare in webcomics, and whenever anyone does it, they lean more towards the mecha style (e.g. Robotech, Gundam) than the super robots (Mazinger Z) let alone gestalts such as Voltron.  For her work, creator Liz Staley decided to go towards the super robots, skipping the modern influences of her peers (Sym-bionic Titan, Megas XLR) and went with the "skeleton in the family closet is an alien giant robot" that you don't see in much giant robot stories, regardless of what country it comes from.  But she's not the only one that did something unique with it.  The Big O went with a noir feel.  Escaflowne and Magic Knight Rayearth started the fantasy real robot trend that has sadly become cliche.  But the point is, Staley and her counterparts went farther.  And that's the key to success.

TOMORROW: Day 15 – Con-Tro-Ver-Sy (Cue the Prince Music!)

  • Anon

    Question from the back: I’m working on some content and a character I have is in some ways similar to a character in a book series that recently became popular.
    Regarding what you said about concurrent ideas in mind, I never read that book series, but I want my computer hacker to be free from claims of “you stole that from Steig Larsson!”

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a5823410970b www.genjipress.com

    Right on!
    This is why I recommend people taste-test areas of interest that they normally don’t graze around in. The more different things / issues / aspects of life you have some experience with, the more you can casually draw on for inspiration and insight.

  • http://www.megamistudios.com Rob

    @Anon: remember to make sure that your similar character is anything but. By that I mean if you’re going to have your character similar to another, have your defenses ready.
    A bad example of this is Captain Marvel (the DC Comics character). Way back when, Fawcett Comics came out with Cap as a counter to DC’s (back then, National Publications) character Superman. In fact, for a time, Whiz Comics was well outselling Action Comics. National sued in 1938, and in a 12 year court battle that’s now a texbook case, the courts found in favor of Fawcett, not because Cap was original (the court opinion was that Cap was a clear ripoff of Superman) but that National had made some technical errors in their case that cost them the trial. National appealed the case the next year and won hands down; Fawcett took a long slide down the rabbit hole ending in DC’s licensing of its property in 1973 and buying the company outright seven years later.
    But again, how to protect yourself from “blatant” similarity? Again, document your differences. I’ll give you an example. I’m writing a companion novel series to Claude & Monet about the war going on the background of the main series.
    One of my characters is a fighter jock named Miriya Parino. Sound familiar? It probably does to old Robotech and Macross fans, familiar with a fighter jock named…Miria Parino (or Milia Falina for the Japanese series). So, yes, they share the same occupation and name, which would seem ripe for lawsuit. But….
    Miria (note the spelling) is a green-haired, fair-skinned Zentraedi who (according to the EU books) doesn’t quite get the hang of being human.
    Miriya (note the spelling) is a dark haired, dark-skinned tomboy from Brazil who very much gets the concept of being human, since she is one.
    Miria’s English/Robotech name is a variant of her Japanese/Macross one.
    Miriya is Brazilian of distant Italian ancestry, reflected in her first name (a Portuguese variant of Miriam) and her last (an uncommon Italian surname).
    Miria is always called Miria.
    Miriya is usually called “Miri” for short or her callsign, “Samba.”
    Miria (depending on the version) had one, or many, kids.
    Miriya wouldn’t be caught dead babysitting, much less having kids.
    Lastly, Miria is from an artificial species bred for war – she’s a natural in Zentraedi armor, or later a VF-1 Veritech (Valkyries, Macross version).
    The last of four kids (she has three older brothers), Miriya actually dropped out of fighter school and only circumstances put her behind the stick again.
    So, similar but different.
    And I’m not the only one that does this. An author I met once writes novels about his smuggler-turned-heroic flying rogue Han Solo. The difference from the Star Wars character? Well, Han Solo (the novel one) exists in 40s Asia during WWII and is more a contemporary to Indiana Jones than his namesake. He also flies a broken down PBY Catalina named the “Just Bad Luck” and has a furry “co-pilot”, his dog Lucky. Also, the blonde-haired, green-eyed, Errol Flynn-mustachioed Solo looks quite different from the “fuzzy nerfherder.”
    The author is a former attorney and wanted to experiment on how close he could toe the line without getting caught; he’s doing well for himself and reputedly signed a copy of his first book for George Lucas himself.
    So it is possible; just document your differences and similarities.

  • Anon

    So would it actually be worth my while to take a break from writing to read the Larsson books to see what this character is like in order to properly defend myself?

  • http://www.megamistudios.com Rob

    Absolutely, if for no other reason than to see what Larsson did and to decide not to go in that direction. You just might find that your similar characters are vastly different already.