Storytelling has played a role in my life from a very early age, and it still influences my life today. When I’m at a loss for inspiration, I convert the story-driven games my twin and I used to play when we were little into scripts and stories. Out of the story ideas I’m working on, two out of the five are just reworked versions of those stories. Honestly, I though the number was higher, so I’m glad to see I have a little of my own imagination.
For some reason, most of these stories (all except one) involve a character turning into a monster or nonhuman creature one way or another. I think that might be inspired by the TV shows I watched and the video games I played growing up; I liked Naruto, a show where the main character is a vessel for a destructive demon that begins to transform him when he gets angry. One of my favorite video games was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, my nostalgic favorite out of the Zelda games wherein Link is transformed into a wolf whenever he steps into the twilight. His sidekick in the game is trapped in the form of an imp, and restoring her, the “Twilight Princess” to her true form is one of the goals of the game. Avatar the Last Airbender, while not involving a transformation per se, involves a main character who struggles to control a tremendous inherited power that can be used for both good and evil. I also like the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for its emphasis on duality. I’ve been told that my stories involve a lot of contrast, and I can only assume that’s due to the heroes occasionally becoming the villains (and vice versa).
There are a few books from my childhood that have become nostalgic comfort books; some of these I haven’t read for years and years, so I can’t speak for the quality of all of them. They tended to deal with a journey through some harrowing experience, especially if the protagonist had to fight against the elements to achieve their goal (even if their goal was only to survive).
The stories that I’m interested in now tend to be more realistic, and I’m more interested in how they’re presented than the specifics of the story itself. For instance, the unorthodox writing style of Markus Zusack in The Book Thief both delights me and infuriates me because I didn’t think of it first. Sometimes I try to imitate his poetic style, but I’ve yet to incorporate it into my writing style in a way that doesn’t feel like stealing. I like my books to have a lot of symbolic elements, such as metaphors being treated as real in order to convey an emotion. In E. Lockheart’s novel We Were Liars, that technique shows up from the very first page and only continues as the narrative unfolds.
So, all things considered, storytelling has been a thing that I could always come back to and I’m always learning new and innovative ways to tell the strange stories that I come up with.