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Hello friends,

I am a huge fan of these storygames and I have been playing them for a couple of months. I have always enjoyed writing so I decided I would try and make an attempt at creating one! Currently my favorite story game is Necromancer, but I also like many, many others that I have played here.

I would be interested to hear what influences everyone in their writing. My main literary influences are two-fold, one in terms of fantasy and the other in general.

In general, I really enjoy classical and medieval literature such as The Illiad, The Aeneid, The City of God, Beowulf, the Romances of Chretien de Troyes, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, etc. In terms of more modern literature that I have been influenced by, mostly Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky but also Cervantes and Dumas.

In terms of fantasy, I started out(and still enjoy) Tolkien. I also enjoyed Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Stephen Donaldson and Terry Prachett are also fantastic writers. Never been a huge fan of A Song of Ice and Fire but I have read it up until A Dance with Dragons. With fantasy, I am also influenced by video games I have enjoyed like Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Arcanum, Pillars of Eternity, and Morrowind.

 

Sup. 

Welcome to the site. I do hope you enjoy your time here.

Hey, welcome to the site. You seem like a person who might enjoy making futile and ultimately doomed attempts to breath life into the Reading Corner.

These days I'm a big fan of Dickens and Kipling and a lot of other writers who have been dead awhile, as well as historical fiction and non-fiction and journals from back in the day.

I don't have time to read as much now but as a kid I read basically anything I got my hands on so it's hard to pick one influence or another. Among others, Jane Yolen and Katherine Paterson's and Jack London's work and the Narnia books, and Redwall and Watership Down (not a furry) all made an impression on Tiny Mizal. I went through Stephen King and Orson Scott Card and Lovecraft at some point as I got a little older as well. Hell, think there was an Agatha Christie phase in there too. And of course, lots of Tolkien, who I'm a big fan of still.

Although most of my current interest in fantasy can probably be directly traced back to staring at the art on Magic cards and spacing out during algebra classes.

Arcanum, Morrowind, and all the Infinity Engine games still own.

Thank you for your welcome. At least you're honest with regards to the state of the Reading Corner. I am not one for hopeless quests but it might be fun to try anyway. Perhaps there could be a small community?

Glad to hear there is another bibliophile here, I love Dickens as well although he is a bit out of my time period, in terms of taste and background.

I was never a huge fan of Magic the Gathering but I do love the artwork. I became interested in Fantasy from my childhood fascination with King Arthur and Merlin. Then when I discovered Morrowind, my first real RPG, I found my new interest in all things fantasy, although it would take me many years before I started really reading.

I am glad that you enjoy those games, it sounds like we might have much in common.

Welcome to the site. Your avatar speaks well of your contributory potential. Good luck!

That's quite a nice resume of likes you have there, and I also really like your profile picture (though I had to squint a bit to read it, alas).

I'm not sure how to describe my tastes, but I probably started on the trek to fantasy when my 1st grade teacher read me things like "James and the Giant Peach" and "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe."  I became a big fan of Greek Mythology by grade 6 or 7, and in grade 9 I read the Iliad and the Odyssey (which I can still never spell somehow.)  I was a little 'meh' with Beowulf, but I read John Gardner's Grendel and quite enjoyed it. (Actually, my first brush with the Beowulf story was a cartoon I saw as a kid based on Gardner's novel; it wasn't really appropriate, but it was on the family channel for some odd reason.)

As far as non fantasy/mythology literature, I enjoyed a lot of very 'innocent' things as a child, such as the Little House on the Praire books.  Or Anne of Green Gables.  To this day I'm still quite 'influenced' by L. M. Montgomery's books; though I imagine they probably bore a lot of people to tears these days.  But there's a lot of hope in those books, and if someone wants to find something to blame for my naivety, that might be a good place to start. ;)

I write a lot of vampire fiction, so it's most likely that I can pin my influences to a mix of Dracula and Anne Rice's original 5 vampire books (mostly the first three.)

I've read so much over the years that it's hard to tell what my major influences are.  I have to admit, most of them are probably NOT classics, or even very good literature.

As for video games, well, the reason I started writing (on my own volition) in the first place was that I loved Final Fantasy 4 (2 in the USA at the time) so much that I just HAD to write a sequel.  I was 12 years old, and it was pure crap, but the elation I felt at finishing it carried me on to write prolifically over the next 8 years.  It tapered off after that, but here I am, 26 years later, and still trying to write.  

Also, Arcanum was an awesome game with a very clunky interface.  Wish it had been a bit smoother, because it was quite in depth compared to other games I had played at the time.  So thumbs up for mentioning it.

Never got to into the rest of the Little House on the Prairie books but The Long Winter is one I reread several times and along with the usual suspects like Hatchet probably was a factor in my love for survival / resource management stuff later in life.

The last book in the series is great though for the way it takes this sudden swerve into the hilariously racist, to point I wonder if schools even carry the series anymore.

The Long Winter is one of my favorites as well.  Though it's not the first time the family was in physical trouble.  I loved the books a lot as a child, and still reference them a lot.  But what I really want is to pick up Laura Ingalls Wilder's actual journal to see the 'holes' that were made in trying to make it a children's book.  For which, in my opinion, there is no shame.  

Also, Hatchet was an awesome book; I also had to read that one in school.

By the 'last' book, do you mean The First Four Years?  Or These Happy Golden Days?  Or the ones that came after and were not credited to Laura herself? (It's been a while since I've read them, and most of the racism I remember was in The Little House on the Prairie, listening to Ma's hatred of 'Indians'.)

Little Town on the Prairie, which whoops, I guess wasn't actually the last.

Yes, the racism there always disturbed me.  But, it really does show that people are more complex than just 'good' or 'bad'.  Though it's one of the reasons I always liked Charles more than Caroline.  Of course, it might be some shading on Laura's part if she was always closer to her father than her mother.  But this is probably way off topic from greeting the OP.  Ooops.

LOL

OOOOH!  I'd forgotten about that scene!  Yikes.  As I said, it's been years.