Inspiration Case Study — Hypernormalisation, Ozymandias, and The Great Gatsby
Inspiration can often come from the most unlikely of sources, and it can affect your work in a variety of ways. If you don’t pick it apart to understand what you’re taking from it, and what you need to leave, you can run into problems. In this post I’m going to examine three sources of inspiration for my political-thriller, The Benevolent Dictator, and talk about how they influenced it, and how they didn’t. First we’re going to talk about Hypernormalisation, the documentary by Adam Curtis.
Hypernormalisation (Adam Curtis, 2016)
Hypernormalisation is a terrifying watch, its official blurb is as follows:
We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed — they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening — but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West — not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves — have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.
But there is another world outside. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago — that then festered and mutated — but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.
It sounds terrifying. It is. But it is definitely worth a watch, it’s like touching the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and having your perceptions widened. (It also sounds like conspiracy theories, it is not, don’t worry). It is available on BBC iPlayer if you’re in the UK.
So if you’re going to take inspiration from it (as I was) you need to pick it apart and analyse what it is you’re reacting to, and what you want to take from it. You can see the central premise of Hypernormalisation in the second paragraph of the blurb “chaotic events are happening — [and] we, and our politicians, cannot understand them”. I wanted to set my novel in this very real world, where events unfold caused not by the actions of a single person, but by the long-term trends of our society. This would be the world of my book.
But I was not reacting to the central thesis, as explained in the third paragraph: “all of us … have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world”. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I was not interested in telling that story.
I also had to try and ignore the tone of Hypernormalisation. The documentary is terrifying, and impersonal. I wanted my novella to be unsettling, but intimate and emotional. And not entirely devoid of hope.
Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818)
We have all heard bits of Ozymandias, we’re all aware it’s an episode of Breaking Bad (and of that trailer where Bryan Cranston narrates it), but nonetheless, it’s worth reading again:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It’s a work of genius. It’s short, but it packs one hell of a punch. It’s even more amazing when you learn that Shelley wrote it for a bet.
To make sure I learnt the right lessons from it I had to make sure I understood what I was reacting to, what inspired me about it. I loved the fact that it was short and punchy, I liked the floral language, and I used extracts of it throughout the novella as well as naming each chapter after a line or a variation of a line (chapter one is “I Meet a Traveller”).
But that wasn’t it. The inspiration was coming from somewhere else. It was the idea of a once powerful empire, so certain of its immutability, reduced to rubble and sand, every trace destroyed except the statue. And I realised my story was about the moment that fate turned against that empire, about the events that led to this destruction, about the hubris.
It wasn’t the image I wanted to take, or the narrative of the poem, or any of the iconography. It was about the theme beyond all that, my novella would be a different route to the same themes. (But I would borrow the iconography for the cover)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
We all think we know the story, but here’s a (very) brief overview:
Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick’s cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.
I knew my book was going to bear no resemblance to it: the setting, the time, the world, the plot, were all different. But something about it was chiming with me. Something about the characters, but not their personalities or their fates (not completely anyway; I liked Nick’s naivety and Gatsby’s superficial elegance). It was a real devil to figure out what it was that I felt inspired by.
Then when I was setting down to write the book, and actually put digital ink to digital paper, it dawned on me what it was. It was the relationship. I wasn’t inspired by the characters themselves, but by the way they related to each other, and how that affected the structure of the novel.
The narrator of The Great Gatsby is Nick Carraway, but the titular character is (obviously) Jay Gatsby. This was similar to what I was planning to do in The Benevolent Dictator, where Ben would be the narrator and Amal the title character. Without realising it, I had replicated the narrative structure, or the viewpoint.
But if that is the case, I asked myself, who is the protagonist? Whose story was I telling? Am I writing Ben’s journey through his eyes, or is Ben chronicling Amal’s journey. Who goes through the greatest change? I thought they both went through significant change, could I have two protagonists? To figure this out I had to go back to the source of inspiration and study that. Who is the protagonist of The Great Gatsby?
And that’s when I realised that the relationship is the protagonist. It is the relationship that goes through the greatest change, that we follow from chapter to chapter. It was this idea that inspired me, and not the characters themselves.
Conclusion
This is a short and simple case study, but if I hadn’t been diligent enough to work through this I would have ended up taking the wrong things from Hypernormalisation, Ozymandias, and The Great Gatsby and not ended up with the novella I wanted. So always take a breath, and spend time to think about why it is you’re inspired by something to make sure you get the most out of it.
Earlier versions of this article appeared on B-Gina Review, Hair Past a Freckle, and B for Book Review
