So when you are writing a
dystopia novel with touches of the familiar, what do you read and use as an
influence? Only the very best of the
dystopian classics, oh, and a little bit of the fairytales we all grew up
hearing.
Let’s look at the dystopian world for a minute. It’s hot and it’s now, or at least, that’s what the media likes to make us think. In reality, dystopia has been around for as long as we’ve been creating; this sense of a world broken or in its opposition: utopia, a perfect world. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia and that was in the 16th Century. Frankenstein, which has many dystopia concepts , was written in the early 19th Century. More recently we have the works of Golding (Lord of the Flies) in 1950’s and my favorites: George Orwell publishing in the late 1940s (Animal Farm, 1984) and Lois Lowry (The Giver). Dystopia isn’t a new concept and it has always been a concept that has appealed to me.
When I read The Giver in middle school, I gobbled it up. I read it twice: I read ahead with the class and then again with the class as they read aloud in a slower pace. I loved it. It thrilled me and engaged me and made me think. Only a few years later and I was reading Orwell (and I fell in love with everything that he’s written) and discovered just how much I enjoyed seeing a world where politics played such a huge part. The protagonist was never what we thought they were and the ending was never so black and white.
Sit that along aside fairytales. Yes, that’s right. Put dystopia next to a fairytale…the real fairytales. Now, I love the Disney version as much as any girl. I played Cinderella every day when I was a kid, then The Little Mermaid after that, and then Beauty and the Beast and so on. But once you dig into the original versions, you realize how dark they really are and how closely you can mix it with dystopia. I had this beautiful, illustrated Little Mermaid that told the original story where she threw herself into the ocean rather than kill the prince; see, not so black and white and not so ‘happily ever after.’ It makes sense… and fairytales are populated with dozens of classic, colorful characters… why not pull from their lasting influence? I certainly won’t shy away from the power of a fairy godmother or sea witch.
Of course… these are just the influences for my current book. There are dozens of blog posts worth of influences for any number of other books…
Let’s look at the dystopian world for a minute. It’s hot and it’s now, or at least, that’s what the media likes to make us think. In reality, dystopia has been around for as long as we’ve been creating; this sense of a world broken or in its opposition: utopia, a perfect world. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia and that was in the 16th Century. Frankenstein, which has many dystopia concepts , was written in the early 19th Century. More recently we have the works of Golding (Lord of the Flies) in 1950’s and my favorites: George Orwell publishing in the late 1940s (Animal Farm, 1984) and Lois Lowry (The Giver). Dystopia isn’t a new concept and it has always been a concept that has appealed to me.
When I read The Giver in middle school, I gobbled it up. I read it twice: I read ahead with the class and then again with the class as they read aloud in a slower pace. I loved it. It thrilled me and engaged me and made me think. Only a few years later and I was reading Orwell (and I fell in love with everything that he’s written) and discovered just how much I enjoyed seeing a world where politics played such a huge part. The protagonist was never what we thought they were and the ending was never so black and white.
Sit that along aside fairytales. Yes, that’s right. Put dystopia next to a fairytale…the real fairytales. Now, I love the Disney version as much as any girl. I played Cinderella every day when I was a kid, then The Little Mermaid after that, and then Beauty and the Beast and so on. But once you dig into the original versions, you realize how dark they really are and how closely you can mix it with dystopia. I had this beautiful, illustrated Little Mermaid that told the original story where she threw herself into the ocean rather than kill the prince; see, not so black and white and not so ‘happily ever after.’ It makes sense… and fairytales are populated with dozens of classic, colorful characters… why not pull from their lasting influence? I certainly won’t shy away from the power of a fairy godmother or sea witch.
Of course… these are just the influences for my current book. There are dozens of blog posts worth of influences for any number of other books…
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