Authors Answer 15: Has your writing been influenced by new media?

This is a long question, so here it is in full: All of us write prose fiction (unless I’m mistaken) in an era that has an astounding variety of storytelling media. Has your writing been significantly influenced by any works of newer media?

I think most authors writing today are heavily influenced by one particular form of media, and that is movies (and its baby brother, TV). Perhaps the advent of photography before that had some influence, in that ordinary people could record themselves, their surroundings and their lives, or send postcards to each other, so that authors no longer had to spend quite so much time describing the scenery. But movies and TV have  pushed authors into a more visual mode of writing, a snappier, scene-driven creation process. In even more recent times, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games with their set-piece battles and ever-more-challenging opponents have had an influence on many writers.

For myself, to be honest, I don’t think any modern media has really influenced my writing that much. I tend to visualise everything as I write, but I don’t particularly think in movie terms, I don’t do RPG and I don’t read manga. Nor do I write the sort of tightly-choreographed fight scenes that derive from modern media. If anything has influenced my writing, it’s the books I’ve read over the years. So I guess the short answer is — no.

Footnote: Authors Answer is the brainchild of blogger Jay Dee Archer, of I Read Encyclopedias For Fun. You can read the answers to this question by his eclectic bunch of authors here. More recently, Erica Dakin, of the Theft And Sorcery blog, has been answering the questions independently. You can read her answer to this question here.