As an eleven year old I started writing short
stories about a suave secret agent, sometimes explicitly Bond, sometimes with the
name changed, and it was the sense of writing into a world that I was so
enamoured by which sparked my initial excitement for writing. I can’t honestly
say that I’ve written any Bond related stories/scripts in quite a number of
years, and yet recently I noticed that I was able to trace the Bond influence
through the scripts that I write now, even if it’s only in the tiniest of
details.
This shouldn’t come as any great surprise. Of course
our inspirations and influences affect our writing, it’s an inevitable fact, just
as it is that the rest of our culture also shapes our work. The question then is, is it a good thing to
pick out the influences from a person’s work, or should it remain a detached
and solitary piece? My answer is undoubtedly yes. All texts whether fictional
or not are connected through Barthes’ tissue of quotations. Take Emily
Dickinson for example, her references to Shakespeare in ‘Drama's Vitallest
Expression is the Common Day’ only serve to enrich the text, connecting it and
her other work to pre-existing stories and associations and allowing it to
interact with a whole history of work and criticism.
Not that it is possible, but if a writer managed to
cut their piece off from any associated texts then it would only be a death
knoll for their writing. A text lives and breathes through its interaction with
other works, it’s what makes it exciting. Why would you deprive your writing of
that?
