Wattpad brings you a guest post from Claudia Lefeve, author of the teen sci-fi Parallel:
While there are many authors I admire, and whose books have inspired me to become a writer myself, I can’t say that they alone influence my writing. I also turn to other mediums for inspiration.
Television innovators like Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams ignite that creative spark that gets my writer juices flowing, as well as other screenwriter/directors, such as John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Robert Rodriguez (to name a few). It’s not just their storytelling that inspires me, but the style in which they tell they story. Regardless of the media outlet, the end result is still the same: to tell a good story.
But for me, the influence of popular culture icons isn’t limited to just inspiration. I often employ pop-culture itself as a literary device. I use elements of music, television, and yes, even books, to create strange new worlds. Or at the very least, to give color to my stories. It’s just another way to add imagery to my varied tales.
Which is probably why Etta Fleming, the main character in PARALLEL, is a movie junkie. In this respect, she’s very much like me in real life. She finds herself going to an alternate world, which doesn’t share her knowledge of books, music, movies, or TV shows. In her new world, Frankenstein was never written, Hollywood doesn’t exist, nor did Doc Brown invent the time-flux capacitor. Because of this, she’s able to use her knowledge of pop-culture from her previous reality, in order to relate to her new world.
My characters tend to have a mind of their own, so I’m thankful my main character shares many of the same favorites as I do and is able to create analogies based on her extensive television trivia knowledge, so she can better explain things like time-travel, parallel universes, and paradoxes. Because much like Etta, who hasn’t grasped the concept of traveling and alternate realities, I myself don’t fully appreciate the complexities of quantum physics… yet.
Check out Parallel on Wattpad!
Destiny has a way of catching up.
Saddled with powers she doesn’t understand, Etta Fleming’s world is turned upside-down the day she meets Cooper Everett, the man who transports her to an alternate reality. A reality she was meant to be a part of. One minute, she’s an orphan living at Dominion House for Girls, an institution for delinquent foster kids, then finds herself attending the exclusive Dominion Hall Academy.
Plucked from the only world she’s ever known, Etta now has to deal with an aunt she never knew, a boyfriend she doesn’t know, and a best friend who can’t know.
PARALLEL is the first book in The Travelers Series.
Also available on: