{"id":345,"date":"2015-04-08T01:16:29","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T01:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/?p=345"},"modified":"2015-04-08T01:16:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T01:16:29","slug":"monsters-elephants-hemingway-cobbling-together-odd-influences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/monsters-elephants-hemingway-cobbling-together-odd-influences\/","title":{"rendered":"Monsters, Elephants, & Hemingway: Cobbling Together Odd Influences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Flashes in the Dark reprinted my story, “Snowfall in the Morning,” a\u00a0dark fantasy\u00a0tale that originally appeared in Thirteen Myna Birds this past winter. This was among my first\u00a0pieces of\u00a0flash fiction, and it remains one of my personal favorites.
\n\"Snowfall<\/a><\/p>\n

Every story is a way for an author to create a fingerprint. Specifically, the behind-the-scenes process, including inspiration,\u00a0is unlike every other\u00a0story that comes before or after\u00a0(or that’s\u00a0what all writers hope anyway).\u00a0With “Snowfall in the Morning<\/a>,” I wanted to move away from on-the-page\u00a0violence, opting instead to keep the horror elements (mostly) unspoken.\u00a0The implied can be\u00a0much more powerful than the overt, especially in literature.\u00a0In fact, the piece is so ambiguous that the reader has to decide exactly what the unseen monsters are.\u00a0Zombies and vampires are the common guesses, but the creatures could be anything your imagination chooses.<\/p>\n

My influence\u00a0for the ambiguity in “Snowfall”\u00a0came from arguably the most impressively vague\u00a0short story of all time: Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” I had read\u00a0the tale of Jig and the American\u00a0for the fourth (or fifth or thousandth) time just before starting the first draft of my story. Again and again, I’m\u00a0profoundly impressed with\u00a0how Hemingway\u00a0communicates so much with so few words. His prose is sparse and direct yet overflows with meaning and subtext. Anytime my fiction is getting too wordy, I think of Hemingway and immediately cut the nearest adverb. And even though my first drafts are sometimes a little bloated, I like to think that by employing the Hemingway method, my fiction\u00a0ends up\u00a0a little leaner by publication.<\/p>\n

Strange bedfellows, Hemingway and monsters, but I suppose you could say the same about Jane Austen and zombies, and that turned out swell. Still, to horror writers, looking to Hemingway for genre inspiration might seem random. To non-horror writers, looking to Hemingway for genre inspiration might seem blasphemous. So why use a story so grounded in reality to inspire a story so grounded in the fantastical?<\/p>\n

\"On<\/a>In the book, On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association<\/em><\/a>, I came across some of the best writing advice I’ve\u00a0ever found: read outside your genre. It can be easy to get swept up\u00a0with writers who are published in the magazines and journals you most admire, but looking elsewhere can help cultivate fresh ideas that you might not otherwise\u00a0envision if you stay in charted territory. So when I’m drafting a new tale, I’m as likely to be thinking of Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Matheson as I am of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Sherman Alexie. At the very least, it ensures the planning process never gets boring. Plus, as I found with “Snowfall in the Morning,” you never know where the inspiration of non-genre masters might take you. It can be a fun\u00a0ride exploring new paths you never thought you’d take, and at the end of the day, that’s exactly what writing should be: fun.<\/p>\n

So who are you favorite inspirations? Let me know in the comments below!<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Flashes in the Dark reprinted my story, “Snowfall in the Morning,” a\u00a0dark fantasy\u00a0tale that originally appeared in Thirteen Myna Birds this past winter. This was among my first\u00a0pieces of\u00a0flash fiction, and it remains one of my personal favorites. Every story is a way for an author to create a fingerprint. Specifically, the behind-the-scenes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-flashes-in-the-dark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}