Here is a question posed by someone who wanted advice for a friend trying to write a horror story. My reply given below attracted a lot of interest from the gothic community. See what you think:
Question from S.H : "My writer friend sent me a short story of hers for review. However, it had striking similarities with a Lovecraft story called The Music of Eric Zann and I have no clue as to how to help fix this or keep her from scrapping the story.
"It isn't perfect, English is not her first language and it was written about two years ago when her English was much worse. I still think there is hope for her story, I just don't how this can be fixed."
Answer: Hi, S.H. I see two issues here, neither of which is a problem.
Firstly, let me say that there is nothing wrong with a story that has striking similarities to another. As long as it’s written with passion and skill, no one should care.
Watch John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven and then follow it up with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The first film is a direct copy of the second, adapted from the feudal rigor of old Japan to the violent wilderness of the early American West.
Both are phenomenal works of cinema that have stood the test of time. Are they two stories or one? It doesn’t matter. If you can rewrite Beowulf, so filled with adventure and power that it seizes a modern audience by the throat like the poisoned bite of an earth drake, then you are a great writer who deserves to be read and enjoyed.
Dan Millman’s wonderful book Way of the Peaceful Warrior is clearly very heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda’s first work: The Teachings of Don Juan. My feeling is that Millman could have entitled his bestseller: I Wish I’d Had A Teacher Like Don Juan And If I Had This Is What It Would Have Been Like .
As a man who has read so much Castaneda that when I close my eyes, I can sense the beating of his heart, I loved Millman’s attempt on that same summit by an only slightly different route. My familiarity with the master helped me to fall in love with his shadow.
Pablo Picasso once said that bad artists copy, good artists steal. Originality is a fine thing, but it is not the hallmark of creativity and a work should never be judged on that alone.
This brings me to the second point, and that is the quality of the writing.
I am assuming that your friend loves to write. If this is true, then she must be addicted to reading her own work, and thus be a slave to the urge to reread and rewrite, to beat and to burnish her own words until they shine with the fevers that consume her heart.
This is the hunger that makes us what we are: the need to breathe so much life into the words on the page that they become alive, dancing in the minds of our readers, suspending eternal moments in their brains in which the secrets of our souls are whispered and screamed for the rest of their lives.
Her English is improved, she has the fleshy bones of a story already crafted by her own imagination. How can she resist the yearning to take hold of it and carve the possibilities of her hopes and dreams into it? She has an opportunity in front of her that should set her thoughts ablaze with inspiration.
This story is not a broken thing to be fixed. It is an unfinished thing to be made whole, an embryonic stream of thoughts to be fed, nurtured and thickened until its heart beats and its lungs crave the fresh, cold air of the big, wide world.
Tell her to rewrite it. Not this way, or that way, but one page at a time, and the devil take any passing resemblance to anything written by another.
Let it grow and change like a human mind evolving with the pressures of life and time, until it is the biggest, the best and boldest it can be. Until she feels from cranium to womb that she has nothing left to give to it. That it is a lover spent of all further joy and surprises, and just a fond memory to be enjoyed while she skips enriched to pastures new.
And it will be then that she looks back on that nascent tale, written in less than perfect English, and wishes with all her might that she had one more just like it: another perfect spark to fire the deepest joy a literary being can feel.
Hope that helps. Sometimes I miss the point because I am insane. I apologise if I have done this here.
Peter
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