Hello again, audience, and welcome back to the Fox Den. I've had a lot of spare time in the last month, so I've been catching up on all the reading I haven't been doing in the last year or so. I also discovered that the fines on my library card were not high enough to have my account locked, so I've even been able to check out books with my own card. :D Exciting stuff, I know. What's important is that all this reading has gotten me in the mood to write, and with that comes enough thoughts to write a blog. So here I am.
When it comes to books, I'm a pretty discerning reader. Before I will even read a book, I have to A) find the title and the font on the binding pleasing enough to want to pick it up, B) find the cover art appealing enough to want to learn more, C) find the back/inside cover copy interesting enough to want to open the book, D) find the prologue or introduction interesting enough to want to read the first few chapters, and E) find the first 50-80 pages interesting enough to care about the characters, the plot, and be curious as to what happens next. As a result, I've started a lot of books and never finished reading them.
However, the books I do read cover to cover are the ones I end up owning and reading again in the future. Like The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer, which I read twice in the first week and at least three more times since then. My most recent discovery of that sort was The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King, a direct extension of his Dark Tower series. This particular book is a story within a story within a story, which is a first for Stephen King as far as I'm aware. It takes place between the fourth and fifth Dark Tower novels, and tells of the main characters of the series taking shelter from a huge storm. Roland, the totally awesome gunslinger, is talked into telling a story to his companions. He decides to tell a story from his youth, during the course of which his younger self tells a Mid-World fairy tale to one of the other characters. Now, Stephen King's Mid-World is already one of the most interesting worlds I have ever read about, and getting to hear a fairy tale that the young children of that world would have been told was an interesting and incredible opportunity. It was around then that I went to the bathroom and came to a realization as to my personal philosophy regarding storytelling, and the act of creation in general.
As an aside, for anyone who doesn't know, the bathroom is actually the best place in the house to think. I have had countless incredible ideas while going about my various daily activities in the bathroom. It never fails to amaze me that the kitchen or the bedroom or the other rooms of the house fail to have such a magical enchantment about them that seems to emanate from the cold porcelain and laminate tile in the bathroom.
Whether you're a writer, an artist, or a musician, you're creating something out of thoughts in your head and expressing it through a tangible medium. There are thousands and thousands of musicians and artists and writers in the world who create things, and then present them to us consumers to hopefully trade our money for. Many of them are not incredible, but they sell anyway. Some of them are pretty amazing, becoming household names and making a decent living off of their creations. A select few are fantastic, blowing minds and impacting people for generations after they've created something, and even after they're long dead. And for all the writers and musicians and artists in the world, there are a very select few that I really love, and a slightly larger number that I even consider worth noting. Until the other day in the bathroom, I had never been able to figure out why that was. But now I've got it.
In music, art, or writing, what I really love and prize upon is finding things that I've never seen or heard before. One of my favorite bands these days is Periphery. I discovered them a year or two ago and I've been hooked ever since. What really got me about them is that their style comes from a fusion between the brutal, heavy feel of technical metal and the lighter tones and strong melodies from both the guitar and the clean vocals. Before them, I hadn't found a band that fused the two in such a way as to create songs that were both heavy and technical, and yet ultimately full of singable melodies and memorable guitar lines, while still keeping a groove that you can bob your head to. They were a unique gem among all of the progressive metal and hardcore bands that were plaguing my earholes. Between The Buried and Me's most recent releases, Parallax: The Hypersleep Dialogues and Parallax II: Future Sequence were interesting for a similar reason. They tell a complete story about two men dealing with self doubt and regret for past actions and eventually being driven to their own doom through technical riffs and melodic themes that sent chills down my spine. I'm proud to own a copy of the special edition lyric and art book from Parallax II, as it gave the meanings of the lyrics and the overall plot of the story, as well as the themes the group was trying to present in each song and through each lyric.
A similar trend exists in my taste in books. The Dream of Perpetual Motion is unlike any other book I've ever read, and it stole my brain away for a full five readings. Even now, I'm still pulling more thoughts and ideas and themes out of the thickly layered plot and ideas presented in an incredibly unique and interesting manner. I could write another two or three blogs about it (in addition to the one I already have, found here) and still not cover everything I've learned from it. Stephen King's Dark Tower is full of lifelike characters with all their own goals and ideas and plans that get totally thrown off track when they meet Roland, a man whose determination to reach the Dark Tower has left many corpses in his wake. My most recent series of fascination is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which presents a full, living world with interesting characters and a compelling story that binds them all together.
Looking at all of these ideas, I realized that the common theme among the presented examples (and all of their peers within my book and music collections) is that they all present thoughts and ideas in ways that I had never seen or heard used before. Each story told of a world unlike any other I had read about, full of interesting characters who did things and had to deal with problems I could never face, but were real enough for me to become emotionally involved in their story. Each song had a definite point and theme that was supported by the music surrounding it, music that was woven together in ways I had never thought of before. Melodies that still ring in my head, days and weeks away from my last listen-through of the album. Songs that I will love for many years to come and hope to be able to one day share with my children.
I can now define good storytelling as telling a story that no one has ever heard before in an interesting and compelling way. Teen Supernatural Fiction has become a specific genre at the bookstore, and it hurts my soul every time I walk by that shelf. Because every single one of those authors specifically wrote books revolving around the same three or four premises and then made money selling their crappy, overdone, trite, and overall uninteresting stories. They did it because Teen Supernatural Fiction is what was selling well (thanks to Twilight for helping push on that one) and they wanted to make oodles of cash selling books to teens. The Science Fiction/ Fantasy section is less polluted, but is still full of authors who took incredibly similar plot skeletons or story elements (like robot uprising, zombie apocalypse, dragon riders, schools for young magicians, prophesied heroes coming into their own, etc. ad nauseum) and then built their own world around it.
Tolkien will be remembered for many generations to come, not because he wrote fantasy novels, but because he created a fantastic world full of different cultures and characters spanning across hundreds and thousands of years that inspired generations of fantasy writers (and six big budget films, ahem ahem). Jack Vance created countless peoples and cultures and worlds that spanned his novels, while telling compelling stories with impressive vocabulary and highbrow wit. Stephen King doesn't just write horror stories. He creates living, breathing, thinking, feeling characters that we sympathize so much with that we can share in every single moment of their horror, or their descent into madness. Pet Sematary, IT, and The Shining are some of the best novels I've ever read. Not because they were terrifying and full of monsters. Because the stories revolved aroud characters that were more realistic than many others I've ever read about.
My point is that true talent in creation comes in creating something new and original out of what has come before. The Wheel of Time was definitely not the first fantasy story ever written, and it's far from the last. But it is one of the biggest and most creatively built of the genre. There are dozens of other fantasy series that surround it on the shelves of bookstores and libraries worldwide, but none of them will come close to touching its legacy, because none of them had that same uniqueness and creativity at their core. The Devil Wears Prada is at the end of a long trend of groups that descended from punk, and they were not the inventors of the newer hardcore scene. But, their playing style and guitar techniques set them at the head of their subgenre. In the years following With Roots Above And Branches Below and the Zombie EP, the entire subgenre morphed to sound more like TDWP, taking influence from their groundbreaking sound. Periphery has actually had a similar impact on the new hardcore scene in the last few years, interestingly enough, and now progressive metal has left its mark on hardcore. Now dozens of bands sound like bastardized versions of their sound, and it creates a giant field of sludge in the internet music community.
Musicians and writers alike 'take influence' from their peers and those that came before them, but a lot of times all that comes of it is a poor ripoff of the original. I'm one of those weird dreamer kids who wants to write fantasy and science fiction, as well as be a musician, and I could spend hours talking about writers and musicians who have influenced me. At the end of the day, though, I'd be most proud of my work if I didn't sound anything like my influences.
I'd be happy to relate back to the music I enjoy to listen to, or the books that I really love, but I don't want to be put into a category with those creators' names listed at the top, labeling my work as another Tolkien or Periphery copycat/wannabe. I just want to write like me, and make music that sounds like my own creation. I want to stand apart from my peers and my predecessors because I did something no one else has done before. Because I told a story that no one has ever heard before, full of sights and sounds and smells they've never experienced. Because I wrote a song with a combination of words and notes that no one else has ever used, with a unique melody that sticks in your mind and lyrics that really mean something to someone.
What songs or books do you really love, audience? What authors and artists stand out as the creators of something new and unique that no one else has done before? I'd love to hear what you read and listen to. Until next time, dear audience.
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