MÜELLIF: The Input/Output Stream
Part 3 of 4 of my writing series. This week: themes and motifs in my work!
I find it funny when people have printer problems. Do these still happen? I don’t come across it anymore. None of my friends reference printers. But I swear it was popular; everybody seemed to have a beast of a machine in their own homes. There’s this mythological printer monster in people’s minds, I feel, one where you try to get it to do something (ostensibly printing a pdf onto real life paper) and it refuses to cooperate, like a living being. Maybe it’s a printer cartridge acting up, or maybe it’s the confusing interface that leads to problems. That’s not what you hear though. That is usually “The printer doesn’t work”. It makes me think they don’t know, or they don’t really want to know, but they try really hard to get it to work again through whatever means, and that’s amusing to me. It has to work, and if it doesn’t, we treat it as this thing upon which all our rage unleashes, no ifs and buts. You’d think that tech people would be different about this. I can tell you firsthand that we’re not, because it’s what I deal with just about every day. It leads me to think about inputs and outputs a lot at work. What you put in and all the ways it decides on the outcome.
In writing, people call inputs inspiration and influence, and outputs is, well, the work, or put another way references, allusions, and motifs. Welcome to MÜELLIF, the series where I write about writing every Friday for the month of August. Last week, I talked about my process. Two weeks before that, you got to read the airplane story from me. This week, I want to detail my personal inspirations and influences, and the ways in which they appear in my own work.
One thing a lot of writers will tell you is to read widely: things within the genre you want to write in, things outside your genre, fiction, non-fiction. The trick here is, of course, that it’s supposed to be prose. Not light novels, not manga, not comics. The written word. I can’t overstate how important it is to actually read in order to write. My prose started to get actually decent when I started to read novels and could imagine other people’s words in my mind’s eye. So I try to read a lot, and I try to read consistently. I typically write science fiction and fantasy -- really just about anything with a speculative, slightly unrealistic angle to it -- but looking at the novels I read this year, for instance, there’s a good balance of that, YA, historical fiction, poetry, writing theory, and literary fiction. And Sailor Moon, that is its own genre. The benefit of “cross-pollination”, as its called, is supposedly that it helps you try out different things, and that it stops limiting you. For me, the reason why I personally cross-pollinate this much is because a) genres are fake and even if they weren’t, I really can’t stand staying in one spot for too long, it feels way too limiting, and b) I’m always looking for good prose. It’s kind of an obsession. If the prose is good, I’ll subconsciously soak it up like a sponge, and my writing will resemble that book’s? And then I have to edit that over. Also, when characters live their (non-WASP) culture, I soak it all up as a kind of reference as to how I can approach that in my own work. And reading widely will help me find more of that. This world is far from an ideal one, so every book I read has to clear a tall bar. I am aware of how this sounds. I don’t think I’m unnecessarily mean or can’t enjoy anything (spießig, like you would say in German) but I have high standards. Really, when I ask myself how I would’ve written a book, that’s kind of the moment I know I’m not adoring it.
So what are my influences? I grew up with Barbie films (the fairytale retellings and Fairytopia, all of which I recorded on VHS back then), reading fairytales — especially the legend Hans Christian Andersen — and shonen anime, the pinnacle of writing with tropes and treating women like garbage (oh thank God I didn’t take that from it). One thing shonen anime will have is a character that goes “to the dark side”, and act out their evil selves before their friends save them and they go back to the bright side instead. So many anime have it. Beyblade has it. Yu Gi Oh has the character Malek that obviously has that, and the Orichalcos arc features it, and Jaden Yuki / Judai Yuki kind of has it too. Sailor Moon has it. I found my favorite character in Soul Eater manga because of it. My favorite arc in Revolutionary Girl Utena centers around this. I really like it when characters have a downward spiral, and it’s dark and they’re godawful people to the people they love, sort of the things they would never say but here they are! (No, this is not open to psychoanalysis).
I love it when characters struggle with their powers and grow from that. I love princely male characters. I also love when women have superpowers. I love male characters that deal with darkness in some form, but I also really love Luffy so do with that what you will. Other major childhood influences, I would say, are Winx Club, Avatar: The Last Airbender and then One Piece. Hell I’ll even throw in Ben 10 in there because I watched so many episodes of that and shapeshifting is amazing. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I probably feature smokers and leg-kickers so extensively because man, back when Sanji wasn’t a total homophobe and transphobe, he was just so cool to me. The adventure they go through, the superpowers, the way the dramatic beats are handled, I think I can all attribute it to One Piece. ATLA has Zuko and Season 3’s “The Beach” is one of my favorite episodes ever. Complicated people being complicated to one another is amazing. AndWinx Club went platinum in my childhood. I would use playing cards and Barbies that we had at home - I remember one of them would have her head flown off whenever we did something too crazy, and I called her Milena? - and me and my brother, we would act out scenarios so obviously inspired by Winx Club. Characters would all be coupled up too… It was the first and last time I had white, heterosexual characters, I think. Also, the show featured Musa, a literal fairy based on sound and music (I mean, hello???), Tecna, who had the coolest design to me, and Darcy, who bid people to her will, which was terrifying but I also had a boner at the sam-- I mean, I was amazed by it a ton.
I also grew up playing Mortal Kombat: Trilogy. The fighting style of Jade especially got to me. Her kick combo (this one, and her acid kick), as well as Sheeva’s, and then Rain’s roundhouse kick that would send the player flying across the screen - those have been imprinted in my mind forever. Besides this, my childhood films have often been action. This may sound odd to say, but I like bodily violence in fiction quite a bit (as opposed to gun violence, which I really don’t). There’s a thematic potency to it, sure, but it’s just endlessly satisfying to watch a character have their bodily routine, make a choreography. I feel endlessly inspired watching dancers, athletes, and gymnasts for similar reasons.
Then in 2013, I watched Free: Iwatobi Swim Club, which is an anime that has probably hardwired every single way in which I write. Jokes… but also not. See, Free follows Haruka Nanase, who “only swims freestyle” but he no longer swims because he broke his rival/childhood friend Rin Matsuoka’s heart, who left off to Australia to become a competitive swimmer. Only when the story starts, he’s returned… and he’s no longer the man that Haruka remembers him as…
Spoilers for an almost ten year old show but, I mean, like:
I write like that. Like… this is just me, as a blueprint!
This Substack is not about that. One Substack post will be about that. It will be. But believe me, the way that show handles drama and all its character arcs, and the themes — Rin and Haruka’s dynamic???? — I write about that all the time. I think I’ve gotten better at it than the show is, but that’s fine. The student learned everything from its master.
Other anime that I think influenced me in a similar manner would be Ping Pong: The Animation and Persona 4 The Animation, both of which aired in 2014.
Sometime 2016 I got into indie music and, more crucially, I got into film. The first director I ended up loving was David Fincher. He’s surgically precise in the way he shoots films. It’s cold and sparse. He rarely does close ups unless it’s necessary. It allows the scenes to be harrowing, which makes him amazing with thrillers. Especially with the way he directed Fight Club, all those greens and blues and yellows, I wish I could write the way he directs. (Another film with copious amounts of violence, I am aware). Another film that imprinted itself on me forever is The Social Network, also directed by Fincher with a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin, where everybody thinks they’re the smartest in the room and nobody says what they mean. “I was your only friend” shouldn’t be so dramatic, but it is. And the scene where Wardo (Andrew Garfield) stands outside the rain shouldn’t feel so casually cruel, but it does. The other part of the trifecta is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). I cried once while reading the script, and then both times when I saw the film. Memory and relationships and choosing to love someone - oh yeah, I love that. Lastly, Moonlight. Utter tenderness, utter sadness, so moving while saying so little. I think this is like 70% responsible as to how I write. That atmospheric style is also what I like about Studio Ghibli’s works a lot - though fundamentally different from how Fincher operates, Ghibli’s works opt to tell less and show more, and what is shown is often melancholy, almost nostalgic even. It got me to think about the atmosphere of a place a lot, the way color can play into it, or really just descriptions that are rooted in sensations. Mood is important to me, in case I spent around 1k on “setting the mood from the first paragraph” last week wasn’t clear enough. It’s infinitely harder to do this as well in writing as in moving pictures, but I still want to try and I measure myself on that standard: how well I can set and keep the mood, how well I can submerge the reader into feeling what I want them to feel in that moment. I mentioned the written word is how you sharpen your pen, but in truth, in my head, all my story ideas are in film.
I think the novel that cinched it, that made me think I could actually perfectly encapsulate the mood, was when I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern for the first time. I don’t particularly love the book, though my friends do, and for the purpose of this Substack, it’s irrelevant to know what the story is about. There is this scene, rather early on in the book, when male protagonist Marco meets this female character Isobel and they both go outside:
“This will do,” he says. He leads Isobel off of the pavement and into the space between the wall and the gate, positioning her so her back is against the cold wet stone, and stands directly in front of her, so close that she can see each drop of rain on the brim of his bowler hat.
[...]
Blinking as her eyes adjust to the light, Isobel first sees Marco in front of her, but something is different. There are no drops of rain on the brim of his hat. There are no drops of rain at all; instead, there is sunlight casting a soft glow around him. But that is not what makes Isobel gasp.
What elicits the gasp is the fact that they are standing in a forest, her back pressed up against a huge, ancient tree trunk. The trees are bare and black, their branches stretching into the bright blue expanse of sky above them. The ground is covered in a light dusting of snow that sparkles and shines in the sunlight. It is a perfect winter day and there is not a building in sight for miles, only an expanse of snow and wood. A bird calls in a nearby tree, and one in the distance answers it.
Isn’t it just perfect? Isn’t it just so vivid and visceral, a true film in your head? Mrs. Morgenstern will always be my style hero for this scene alone. I obviously adore Ocean Vuong as well, and Chuck Palahniuk is kind of the literary equivalent of David Fincher to me (minimalistic and sharp) for me, but this scene… the prose of it, its excellence, this is what I chase in all my work.
I think the way I try to replicate that is by either setting everything in Vienna or some variant of it, or I recall the trips to Turkey in some form (narrow streets either inclining up or down, no difference between boardwalk and street, buildings everywhere where we walked), or it’s just the inside of buildings I’m very intimately familiar with. Nymph’s Pond takes place in a pond because I grew up near one. I always fear people will be able to tell, or scarily point out where exactly I live. But they never do. It wasn’t deliberate before, but this year I made a point to feature Vienna everywhere. I dreamt of that city for an entire year while I was holed up in my own room. When I go out now, I have a love for the city I never felt before. I want people to meet this annoying, cold, beautifully spotty place, even if just in words. I hold no romance for it; I can’t believe you would set an entire romantic film in Vienna (Before Sunset). Like… how? In Vienna we are rude and cold to one another and saying “geh schleich di” is the pinnacle of romance. Kidding. But for me, Vienna is the world in miniature. Everything else fits, and it will fit in.
Of course that makes the output, or one of the motifs, ridiculously easy to spot. The humor that has to make me laugh first before anyone else’s - I really think you can tell I grew up in a culture where dry, sarcastic humor prevails. It’s the same with fanfic, where I’m ostensibly supposed to make it about Seoul or whatever else. I just write about the metropolis in general terms, which is easy to pull off if you’re a city person yourself. Every city I write is just Vienna but from another district. Something else I constantly seem to write about is nature in some form, as in, characters will react to things and there’s always a nature metaphor to go with it. I really like using fire for that, mostly because it’s how I register most of my pain. Like:
The world blurs. His face aches. He feels hands take the phone away from him and then it’s just him and his tears and this world of pain. His hands are shaking and his eyes burn, snot filling his nose.
or:
She breathed in through her mouth, the air tasting cool on her tongue, her hands burning like fire on her thighs.
or even:
That night, somewhere between throwing up the second and the third time - he never really figured out how it tied in to just looking in so much, only knew this is what happened every single day he chose to work in full -, Jaehyun lay in bed, Younghoon’s back faced to him, and remembered this was their fifth anniversary together. Five years ago, he had kissed Younghoon and called him his, and love had poured out of him like a fire taking him whole. He still felt that fire now: smaller, maybe, but steady, always so steady.
I also really like electricity for similar reasons, such as:
Her nose felt thick, and a long stream of snot threatened to come out of it. Her throat had stuck itself in a thick knot, unable for a sound to escape. The energy in her came in waves, running like a sort of electricity, freezing her in place.
Love blooms. People feel ice growing in them when they’re afraid, or go numb. Gravity will leave them. I think this is pretty standard for everyone. I wrote a whole novel about a girl having water powers. I only recently started making the symbols and metaphors more consistent throughout. Flash fiction helped with that, I would say, as did reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. And also, as I rewatch Revolutionary Girl Utena - another major influence to me alongside Princess Tutu - I think I’ve always wanted more consistent symbols in my works. I think I can pull it off decently now, if that paper plane story was any indication. These two shows are probably also the reason why I feature storytellers at almost every turn. Or, well, I’ve been writing for a decade, so I can’t really turn off the part of me that tries putting things into narrative, that narrates things like I’m reading a novel to myself. I recently tried out narratives in narratives, i.e, a character narrates a story to another. It’s so much fun to write that.
On a grander level, I write about outsiders. Be that people that have a special power that marginalizes them, or people that are just a general racial minority (usually that’ll be a Turkish character as protagonist), or even just characters that try very hard at playing “normal”, though this normal is undefined and it drives them crazy - they are defined by feeling different from everyone else, at all times. This also usually means it’s a kind of unsympathetic society, which also paints the world as a cold place in turn.
"Sihir," Damla repeated. The word sounded like a spell on its own: something secretive that wound itself around the chest not unlike a snake. And sihirbaz, magician, that seemed even more ludicrous: someone counterfeit making a living off the counterfeit. But was the counterfeit real? Damla lay down on her bed, staring the stars on her ceiling that glowed in the dark. And wasn't it a secret to begin with, her secrets that she had told the water surface, day after day of her emotions to Jazmine? Did sihir explain why all her classmates had hated Damla? Had they seen it before she did it on herself? Could you sense such a thing? What was its taste? Did it have a color, like an aura? Was it on her skin? Was that why she was browner than most everyone in Cruz, her father, her grandmother? Damla picked on her skin; it was like lifting a malleable, but heavy fabric. She pinched the skin on her forearm, then it snapped back to where it was. Where was the sihir now? Did it come if she asked it to?
Translator’s note: sihir means magic.
I don’t think I could write about people that are fully integrated in society. First, because I’m still mentally stuck looking for a conflict when I write (did you know that is not actually an universal standard, just something Anglophone people think you should do?), and second, because I don’t know what that’s like. I mean to say I just don’t know how it would feel to be the ethnic majority, after about a quarter century of not being that. Sometime in 2017 I made the conscious decision of featuring Turkish characters, and it opened up avenues for me - be it culturally or in terms of the potential conflicts. I have heard that makes my writing harder to access, be it because Turks refer to each other in Turkish terms or use Turkish filler words or reference cultural things that I cannot be bothered to explain, because I learned American culture the same way. (Once I was asked if “lan”, a crude exclamation, was an insult. I did laugh at that). I’m aware that I can only portray the diaspora Turk, the diaspora Austrian Turk, rather than the mainland Turk, and that means, as far as “representation” goes, I will never represent anyone but myself. I’m fine with that.
Characters will feel comforted by the friends they have, there’s always this one scene where they’re flabbergasted that they can even enjoy social interactions. It’s pretty funny, but I think that pops up a lot with my works too. There’s also someone that will haunt the character from their past, or their past in general. Like here, when Damla just imagines her high school time again… and her imaginary hero, the water woman, floods the place:
Damla was running in reverse to her high school, to the main hallway, stopping right at the gate to find the tiny wastebasket on her left. The painting, a giant canvas, lifted in the air and fixed itself to one. "This is so stupid," she muttered out loud, but her imagination kept going: the water woman stared back at her, jumping out the canvas, and made a high arc with her arm.
There was nothing at first. Then, the giant rush of water: it rushed from behind, flooding every surface, and suddenly people were populating the school, swimming, trying to come up from the water. Everyone was struggling except for Damla, who was still standing. A great shiver seized Damla's body - at the water, or at the woman, or both, she didn't know. The water woman looked at her, her eyes an abyss on their own. She turned to Damla and said, simply, "Sihir bu."
Parents pop up in my original fiction more often than in fanfiction, where I’ll just be too busy to include everyone of the cast somehow. And one parent will always be a scar to the character, like:
He types Karabulut.
The name his father had rejected.
I always tell my friends the most unhinged male characters elsewhere in fiction are characters I’d write (Max Wolfe of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl is very much that), but honestly I never really write that type of character. It happened only twice so far. What I say less is that I adore the hard-boiled female character, and she does pop up in my work quite frequently. You met Leanne last week, but here’s Ferda, for instance:
It's not as though I'm dead. Some of the people here cried at night during training, some corpses hang on the dorm rooms when nobody's there. Others try to pass the time with games and entertainment. I don't. I don't see the appeal. My hair has always reached to my hip, and I've always chipped at its ends when I'm bored. I've always looked this closed off in the reflection. I've always talked this little. I get called mute for a short while until I break the mirror, my hands both bloody, and everybody in camp goes through great lengths to avoid me. I break a bathroom tile and watch it get restored the very next day. I run my scissors to my pillow like I'm stabbing a person and the next evening I find it perfectly fine. Nothing I do lasts. Everything I do is repetitive and permanent. I break myself apart so nobody else has to. I restore whatever I can manage. And all I have is this neverending anger.
And she will feel repulsed at human affection, like Kova:
He stared at me for a long time then. Then he laughed again. "I like you a lot, Kova," he said.
You remind me I have a soul, I thought. I immediately shoved it away from me.
But it’s not as though all of these things are set in stone. I tried my first NSFW scene the other day, something I didn’t think I would do, and it’s opened me up to exploring the body. My friend mentioned how potent tragic love stories are, and it’s opened me up to break-ups and messy relationships. The question of “what if” is such a strong one that it leads you to think about things you’ve never thought of before, which means you always have to be open to all the what ifs out there. Which leads me back to cross-pollination again…
It’s always a matter of input deciding the output, and luckily, you can always decide your input. In fact, you can even tinker with the output, though just like in tech, where things are logged at all times and have to be, you’ll show your hand somehow. For the purpose of this Substack, let’s just say tinkering with the output works as part of revision.
There’s this booktuber I semi-keep up with, a white guy a year younger than me. When asked about if he’d like to write a novel, he said, “I think I haven’t lived enough yet to write a novel.” I got told that, “you can’t write because you haven’t lived life” when I first said I would write a novel, and every other time I said I would write a novel. It’s funny to me. I’m a homebody, chronically online, maybe. I’m not exactly social. And yet, I can draw enough of my life into my characters. I always write about my life, one way or another. Not just in featuring Vienna or Turks, but in other ways - the things that bother the characters have most likely bothered me in real life in some form. That characters feel alienated from the job, or just don’t like teamwork, or that they’re outsiders, even the way they process things emotionally and panicking and all manners of mental unwellness - that all comes from me, living. Twenty-four years and I feel like I certainly lived “enough” to write, and I know that it connects with people. There’s fics that I wrote when I was much younger - works that are so weak, don’t even begin to cover the depth of the emotion at hand, and yet I get comments that read that people could relate, that they felt sad, and that they laughed. I think “not lived enough” for writing is bullshit. I think maybe you don’t have the balls to write. I get that. Two weeks ago, I mentioned writing is you versus yourself. Guillermo del Toro has said that by the time he’s done, he’ll have written one story. And I agree. There’s only ever one story. When it comes down to it, there’s only one input, and there is only one output. It’s your life, and the story you tell of it.
Next week is about why I write. Or, I guess it’s about feelings, which is gross and cringy. Stay tuned for that!