When Writing Homage, Don’t Copy Wholesale

Writers have influences, but writers should strive to be more than these influences.

This is honestly one of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a writer myself. When crafting fiction, you obviously need a sense of what inspires you personally, sure. You need to understand what films, books, shows, music — whatever — inspires your work. Understanding that will allow you to realize what works best about that other work and what doesn’t. In doing so, you might grow beyond your influences. You use them as a foundation to become more.

However, many works stop short of that. Some writers see what inspires them, and, rather than use that as a source of inspiration, just copy. These creators just recreate the subjects at hand.

The Virtue of Divergence

You see this a lot in genre fiction. After JRR Tolkein published The Lord of the Rings, many writers attempted to replicate his success. Some, like Terry Brooks’s Shannara Chronicles, copied aspects with their own unique spin. Brooks’s world isn’t some pre-industrial age or Middle-Earth, but rather a post-apocalyptic realm that happened to evolve into something like Middle-Earth. The books that work in the Shannara Chronicles are those that do their own thing. The books that don’t are too close to their original influences.