Who, What or Where Influenced your Writing?

Wycombe Library as I knew it

Books have always been a source of inspiration for me. Great literature is like soul food for the imagination. It can take you anywhere at any time, no journey too long, no obstacle too great, no limits, no boundaries. Can I imagine a world where there are no books? NO is the simple answer. When I was a kid, my family couldn’t afford to buy books, (don’t worry, I’ve made up for that big time!), so the library was where I got my weekly fix. My town library during my teenage years was a place of huge inspiration. It was full of books by writers I had heard of and many I had not. 

Wycombe Library now

I made my way round the whole library, reading good fiction, exceptional fiction, high-brow to low-brow, from JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, John Wyndham, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Zola, the Brontes, Edgar Allan Poe, Maupassant, Stephen King, Dickens, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Creasey, Denis Wheately (I told you I read everything!), to John Fowles. I had wide and varied tastes – I still do! Although I never dreamt of being a writer then, I soaked up words like they were going out of fashion.

Penn Bookshop

Some of the thousands of books in Penn Bookshop

When I was about sixteen, my dad and I discovered The Cottage Bookshop in Penn – a second-hand bookshop stuffed full of shelves, nooks and crannies, bursting at the seams with books upon books upon books. I practically moved in, losing hours in that place. I didn’t know then that Terry Pratchett had also spent hours and hours lost in the book alleys of this very bookshop when he was a kid. The Cottage Bookshop was the inspiration for L-space (library space) in Discworld. Pratchett often returned to the shop during his career, and launched his Johnny and the Bomb there in 1996.

Ian Fleming

Stephen King was inspired by writers such as Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, H P Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker. Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe. Ian Fleming's James Bond was apparently inspired by Dennis Wheatley's Gregory Sallust series.

Tolkien was a huge inspiration for me – he led me into the endless worlds and possibilities of a genre I came to love.

So, it’s no surprise then that the first thing I ever wrote was a fantasy epic – complete with its own world, full of many lands, populated by a diverse range of people and creatures. There were several maps, drawn to scale. And hundreds of thousands of words: the trilogy had to be divided up into six parts. The manuscripts have been filed away. Every few years they get dusted off and reread before going back in the drawer. I may do something with them one day... I can’t say that my recent works have been inspired by one writer or a few writers in particular. That’s one I’ll have to mull over.

              

So what, who or where has inspired you to write?

Savita's Website

JANUARY'S AUTHOR by Sharon Tregenza

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa on the 3rd of January 1892.

He spent most of his earliest years in Africa and an incident when he was bitten by a tarantula is reported to have influenced his later work. His father, Arthur Tolkien, was an English banker who died of rheumatic fever after his family had left to return to England. This meant the grieving family had to struggle on a limited income.

An avid reader, Tolkien was influenced by some of the great writers of the time like G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells.

He contracted trench fever in World War 1 and in 1917 was sent back to England to recuperate. That was the end of Tolkien's war service and the beginning of his writing career. He'd begun to create his own language based on Finnish and Welsh and a mythology to support it. This is the work that eventually resulted in his famous books.

He'd married Edith Bratt in 1916 and about this time the first of his four children was born. He continued his mythology while a professor at the University of Leeds.

"The Hobbit" came out in 1936.

Tolkien was now a professor at Oxford. The story goes that he was grading exam papers one evening, opened an exam booklet and found the first-page blank. It seemed like an invitation to write and he famously scribbled "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit".

The finished manuscript arrived at the desk of the publishers Allen and Unwin. Unwin paid his ten-year-old son a shilling to read it. Luckily the boy loved the story and "The Hobbit" soon became a best seller.

In the late 1930's Tolkien began writing "Lord of the Rings"

It was published in three parts and the trilogy also became a massive publishing success.

Five interesting facts about Tolkien's work:

1. He used just two fingers to type the whole of the 1,200 pages of text for the books.

2. Christopher Tolkien, his son, didn't like the "Lord of the Rings" books.

3. Although Tolkien said that the books could be seen as a reference to historical events - they weren't intended to be allegorical.

4. Christopher Lee, who played Saruman in the films, had read the "Lord of the Rings" every year for over forty years.

5. The Beatles tried to make a film of "Lord of the Rings" starring themselves but Tolkien wasn't keen. That would have been a very different film. 

Email: sharontregenza@gmail.com

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