Who are you ripping off?

Well I'm not mindfully ripping off anyone I know, but I am putting a lot of Alice in Wonderland references in there, but making them oblique, so Lewis Carroll I suppose.

I can't think of who the Author is right now, but I am being told mine is very much like the novel "Speak".

[IMG]http://i36.tinypic.com/vx2rki.jpg[/IMG]

I didn't figure it out until I had done a good piece of preliminary plotting, but I am stealing my setup from Anna Akhmatova. "Poem without a Hero": ghosts significant in the narrator's life show up as maskers on New Year's Eve; extensive flashbacks ensue.

Since I am American rather than Russian, my narrator's ghosts show up at a Halloween party.

I'm ripping off David Eggers a TON. I feel nasty about it on the inside.

I'm stealing the pure dialogue chapter start from Orson Scott Card. Honestly, I probably could have written just 50k of nothing but dialogue. (and that's with no he saids, she saids, etc. That's 100% of all of your writing in quotation marks.) But I'm trying to break out of that genre and actually write some damn exposition. But since dialogue is my strength I put the pure dialogue in front of each chapter to up my word count, set the mood, etc.

Of course, in the actual story I still have wayyy too much talky-talky. :(

Totally ripping off Mary Shelley. But that's pretty obvious. ;)

I'd also call Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Z. Danielewski, Franz Kafka, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Michael Cunningham, Peter Shaffer and Nathaniel Hawthorne big influences.

interestingly enough, i'm finding a lot of douglas adams coming out. not that it's sci-fi, but in that witty, unnecessarily wordy way he has of explaining things, and the tendency to end scenes/chapters with a single, ridiculous sentence.

"the difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
- mark twain

http://noweekwillbewasted.proboards.com/

Zola for this one, Dante for the 'real' project.

I think once you detect more than one or two writers impacting your work, it's not really a matter of ripping anyone off, but rather just a case of applying what you've learned from writers you admire to your own work. Eventually that becomes your own writing voice, which no one is born with, but rather it is arrived at.

Dude, Thomas Mann is getting some major rip-offage from this corner. But now I seem to be rewriting Lord of the Flies, so who knows. Sigh.

Bandles... Mann? really? that's a tough one to rip off... I don't think I'm skilled enough to do that haha... But I read your excerpt and it is really good. Would be interested in knowing if you pull it off -- I mean, I'm sure you will! ;).

Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Lolita, Monty Python.

My God, that list makes me look like a psychopath!

A little bit of Janet Fitch, a little bit of Jodi Picoult. I think I would feel worse if I were ripping off writers who aren't as talented, to be honest. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. ;)

Was Lolita good? I skimmed through it in the book store, and have seen both versions of the movie, but I don't have money to buy books and have yet to find it available in any libraries around where I live. I really want to read it!

Lolita is a great novel. If they don't have it at your library, you can always ask them to do a Interlibrary loan. There are a few different editions out there. An annotated version is available, which I'd highly recommend.

Ripping off anyone at this point takes too much effort. I'm just trying to complete this thing!

Lolita is great. Disturbing and terrific. I'm specifically ripping off one part of Lolita, not the whole book, and certainly not the characters.

It's too bad. I have a bookstore in Brooklyn and would gladly order it for you and give you a special writer's discount!

I've got a whole misch-masch of authors I'm ripping off. In terms of content, I'm mostly ripping off J.D. Salinger's Glass family stories, except with hicks from Oregon instead of intellectuals from New York. In terms of the style, it vacillates between a bad imitation of Palahniuk and a bad imitation of Beckett. Sometimes it's nothing in particular.

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2006: Mind Spew (50,000... and some)
2007: Pelmont (50,125)
2008: The Remicks (look at the bar under my username)

Funny topic. I realized this morning while I was drinking coffee that I was ripping of Updike.
Hope he doesn't mind; but there is only so much you can do with middle aged Pennsylvanian philanderers. Though if you are gonna steal, steal from the best (though my mother gets mad whenever Updike comes up, she HATES him).

Hmm right now:
David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, a touch of Albert Camus, some Hunter Thompson, and just a itty bitty dash of Joyce (vomit)

[img]http://davidwclary.com/fun/nanocount.aspx?id=DavidAndrewTow&cat=4[/img]

I named my dog (in real life) Sukey after the character in Updike's Witches of Eastwick....and the chef on Gilmore Girls.

My novel is a love letter to Joseph Heller. Don't tell my husband.

By the way, Lolita is wonderful because Nabokov is the author. He has a greater mastery of the English language than most native speakers (he was not a native English speaker and wrote several languages). He has so much fun with the words, it makes the reading a joy...even for screwy subject matter and a loathesome main character.
Barb

I'm ripping the hell out of Bret Easton Ellis' The Informers right down to structure and pacing.
I must also admit, Jack Keruoac-esque prose pops up like blackhead zits throughout the story.

Daniel Handler (specifically Adverbs, I never read any of his Lemony Snicket books). And a dash of Italo Calvino.

I'm copying Handler quite a bit. But it just so happened that I had this great idea for a frame story, told my fiance about it, and he gave me Adverbs to read--it has a very similar concept!

Stylistically Tim Winton.

Story-wise it's a bit American Beauty meets the Matrix, and Night Watch, with an estranged father-daughter thing, and Underbelly (Australian Gangland wars) thrown in for good measure. Lots of violence mixed with Buddhist spirituality.

Sounds like a dog's breakfast doesn't it?

I guess I'm in the wrong forum *wanders off to be with the Urban Fantasy/Thriller crew*

--
Tyswan
writer ~ artist ~ designer | www.tyswan.com
I recommend a free online-critique group

I'm trying to be Virginia Woolf. Various characters observe the same event (event being rather too strong a term... more like someone says something...) and then they all think about it for a long time, and reminisce, and express insecurities and emotions.

And then time passes, and they're all dead, except a couple of them, who meet up again, and someone says something, and they reminisce, and express slightly different insecurities and emotions.

And then some waves roll on a beach, "I have had my vision", the end.

Only it's like Virginia Woolf, brilliant writer and genius, has had a nasty bash on the head, forgotten three quarters of her vocabulary, forgotten how to construct elegant sentences, and has forgotten all those insights into human nature that she had so carefully observed and gathered and reflected on.

So, I'm being crap Woolf.

x

Probably the phone book (not that they have those things any more) and an art supplies catalogue. Seriously, I have no idea what my style is, not having written a huge amount of fiction before, and daren't re-read - but I am taking a lot of words to get very little done, and describing my character's artistic efforts at great length on occasion, because that's what interests me. Unlikely to be destined for a wide readership then.

I think I'm ripping off Jack Kerouac, that is with the thought that keeps going no matter cramps or if it makes any sense or not. Trying to get into the 'beat' mode by drinking coffee & listening to Jazz & trying to hear the things he heres.

Another answer is I just rip off whatever I hear on my playlist heheheh.

Lessgo to strawberry fields sometime aye?

Nathaniel Bowditch's American Practical Navigator. The section on sextant use is actually giving me some ideas for dramatic conflict. Which is pretty pathetic -- I'm now quite certain that I'm either working too hard or drinking too much coffee.

A little Kafka, a little Fitzgerald, a little John Dos Passos, a tad of Stephen Crane. And some Erich Maria Remarque.

....

Uh.

>_>

The people who write She-Ra.

I know, it's not great literature or anything. But that's who.

Also, some Charlotte Gilman.

Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Canada.

50 Stories; 1,000 words each... will I survive?

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