Writing of Layla Part the Second: Influences

So I wanted to talk a bit more about influences on my story, since it came up in one of the college essays I was writing but the word limit wouldn't really let me elaborate. I'm not quite done with it, but this is more fun to write about right now.

First, and probably most obvious since I basically inserted a direct reference to it with the bat scene, is Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. The first arc in particular. I loved the depiction of the paranoia of the characters in the series as they slowly lost their grip on reality. The show did a great job of keeping the audience in the dark as well, watching it the first time, you really don't know what's going on, and only later do you realize that he was delusional the majority of the time, and that his friends were innocent. I just loved the idea of keeping the audience with the main character, even sympathizing and suspecting the same people he did, only to realize too late at the end when things get completely out of hand that there was something wrong with him.

As for the love aspect of the story, I feel like I should mention Natsume Souseki's Kokoro, in which one part of the story is about a man and his friend who fall in love with the same woman, until the friend commits suicide when the man proposes to marry her. Though he survives and does "get the girl" at the end, he is left with feelings of guilt for the death of his friend. I had wanted to play around with the idea of a jealous lover, and though it didn't quite turn out that way when I finished, a lot of the planning was done with that in mind. Though I did sort of use a similar character dynamic, with a love triangle two friends (I suppose "friends" should be used a bit loosely here, and I guess it isn't truly a love triangle). Anyway, when I was reading it, I felt a strong sense of detachment from the "main character" (I hesitate to quite call him that, but it's good enough for this short write up), like he was detached from everything and just drifting through life. I guess the best way to describe the atmosphere/mood I tried to create is by saying: It's as if all the events in the character's life are clouded by a thick haze, like if he felt groggy when he woke up in the morning but never actually snapped out of it. Another way to say it would be that I wanted to make his perception of life a bit dreamlike, there isn't much attention to detail or the passage of time, and only the most obvious things are noticed and talked/narrated about (and even those things can be mistaken or misinterpreted). That drifted pretty far away from love. Oops.

Finally, there's Lorrie Moore. Her influence is probably more subtle, since I didn't consciously try to incorporate elements of her stories like I did with some of the others, but she definitely had an effect on how I wrote it. I remember reading How to Be a Writer and thinking, "Oh man. She is hilarious. This is the kind of sarcastic humor that I wanted to be able to write." There's always something interesting about her characters. They're never perfect, and they're almost always bitter and making sharp comments about the people and things around them. Though I wasn't thinking, "I'll write a story like Lorrie Moore," looking back, I feel like part of the reason I wrote the narrator as such a sarcastic jerk was because I had read and admired her stories so much earlier in the year.