Has this happened to anybody? I was reading a book today, and the book was mainly about how society is oh, so, terrible . Naturally, I was quite amused by the melodramatics, kept reading, and was inspired to write a book that played off of this. In this fantasy-verse, this mother tries to keep her daughter from venturing out of the country home they live in, and tries to keep her from "materialsm". So, she is shocked when the daughter asks for a new, fashionable dress and starts going into town and taking babysitting jobs! And, worst of all, she meets a boy! It's a drama/parody. Anyway, have you disagreed with something to the point where you wrote something?
I can't say I have, but this reminds me of how Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart as a response to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
It's happened to me many times with forum posts! I don't remember ever writing a piece of fiction because I was angry about another piece of fiction, but I must have at some point. I'm that way. If I thought about it a while, I'd remember.
I know Achebe strongly criticized Conrad and Heart of Darkness, but I wasn't aware he wrote Things Fall Apart as a response. Do you have a source for that?
Here's a short paper about the book from a professor at Binghamton University. In the second paragraph, Dr. Mazrui says:
Spark Notes I should put SparkNotes in the resource sub-forum. I've learned more about symbolism and meaning there than I ever did in my high school lit classes.
Oh, so many things as of late that I can't possibly name them all here at once, and I can't think of them right now. But yes, yes, oh yes, I HAVE been "negatively inspired" by something that has peeved me... and I am in the process of writing it.
Of course! But how is that negative inspiration? Anything that makes you think, makes your creativity percolate, is inspiration, period.
This is the reason I started my band, started writing songs: I'd listen to music and go "yeah, this is great, but I would've done this bit here like this." Kat and I do the same with our stories (except we draw not only from books, but movies, TV shows etc. as well). Sometimes we make fun of / parody the original, sometimes we just write a "better" (to us) version of it, sometimes we write a response of sorts etc.
sure... i do it all the time, since i'm a practicing philospher and my writings are about human behavior... that said, like cog, i don't see how that can be called 'negative inspiration'... 'argumentive' perhaps... or 'disputational'... but since 'negative' implies 'not good' i'd take exception to anyone calling my writings the result of 'negative inspiration'...
I was once told via e-mail (by someone with whom I had been friends for years) that I was no longer part of a band (I had been drumming with them for about a year). I was really upset, and I decided to deal with it by writing a novel about middle-aged musicians. It worked well in dissipating my anger, less well as a novel. I was in the process of completely reworking it when I decided it had just lost forward momentum, decided to put it aside and began my current project.
I was inspired by "Zeitgeist Addendum" to THINK about a response to its Utopian vision of the future. I like doing video projects as well as written word, and I still may do my "response" but I realize that it would be "negative" and that's a mortal sin to commercial success, unless you weave in a nice horror complement, which isn't my concept. I just finished rereading Vonnegut's "Player Piano" along with many writer's robot/automation stories where society at large benefits (or suffers from the benefits) of less labor needed to produce goods. I'm not sure why, but until recently almost all SF writers dealing with the subject just assumed that the populace would have more leisure time and material goods. If that day does come, it would be a major reversal from what has happened and where things seem headed. I thought about writing something along the lines of a Dystopian novel but I'm not up to the task, too many possibilities and I have trouble choosing among them. But to the original question, YOU BETCHA!
