Zelda Games That Have Inspired Me as a Writer
Hey, listen! Last year, the sequel to Breath of the Wild, the latest Zelda game, Tears of The Kingdom—on May 12, to be exact. In honor of this anniversary, I had to reflect on the Zelda games that helped make me a writer and chose my career path. I would not be the writer I am today without wielding the master sword, the urgency of Navi’s voice erupting in my living room, and going on adventures with my favorite character of all time, Link. So, dear reader and writer, “listen!” And maybe try out one of these suggestions—these top three Zelda games will change your life.
Ah, the classic of the classics. Even though I must admit I was tempted to put Wind Waker as number three, Ocarina of Time had to make this list. I know this game is nostalgic for many of us—I often love to replay this game to listen to the classic Zelda tunes we all love. The sound of the ocarina takes me back to the same time Link was a child of the forest protected by The Great Deku Tree. If your goal is to create a series with lore that goes deeper than the Kokiri Forest and classic characters that are loved for a lifetime, this game can be your inspiration.
The darkness of twilight emulates the touching story, characters, and atmosphere of Zelda’s The Twilight Princess. Throughout the game, there is an ominous gloom that changes Link between a human and beast form as he scavenges across Hyrule. Link is actively attempting to save his homeland while trying to distinguish between the hellish landscape that has wrapped its anguish around the kingdom. The Shadow Beasts in this game have stuck with me in my nightmares, as I too slash around like the wolf Link was, trying to wake up. If you are writing a fantasy, horror, science fiction, or anything with weird creatures, turn to this game for creature-building inspiration. This game has some of the coolest bosses I have played against.
I purchased a switch just to play Breath of The Wild, and six years later, I’m still holding on to it, ready to play Tears of the Kingdom. If you are a true Zelda fan and have been playing these games forever, you know how vital world exploration was for us in this game. I felt like a true Hylian, and even though every game above has interconnected me with the Zoras and Gorons, I never felt the free will to create Link’s adventure how I wanted to as a Hylian. The storytelling is not only beautiful in this game, but it is urgent and fluent.
Additionally, the gamer finally gets to see Zelda in a much different light than many of the other Zelda games have given her—she’s strong, determined, and more self-sufficient than ever. If you are looking for world-building and character development inspiration, look to this game.
Honorable Mention: Majora’s Mask
There’s much we can learn from video games. With my knowledge of the Zelda franchise and the accumulated inspiration from the storytelling of these video games, I’d say to you, writer, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” Please, take these video games with care and swing them like the master sword onto your paper; watch your words flow like the gold of the triforce.
Meet the blogger:
HANNA MCDANIELS is an upcoming undergraduate at Hamline University. She majors in English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in professional writing. She is a massive lover of words and storytelling. In her free time, you’ll find her writing about another world or heavily annotating horror and science fiction novels.
Words: Threads of Identity and Understanding
Isn’t it strange how words work in our world? Life is a story that invites us to read between the lines of our everyday experiences. Words are like threads, weaving together the fabric of our reality. Language impacts not just how we interact with the world, but our mindset towards it too. When we pose a question or share a statement, we’re translating our thoughts into words, expressing our inner world through the language we use. In this way, our conversation becomes a unique text, where the ideas, emotions, and intentions encoded in words form the basis of our shared reality. Sometimes the things people say are unclear or abstract, but specific words help us uncover their deeper meanings.
Decoding words shared in conversations can feel like deciphering a cryptic code, unraveling the layers of meaning. Especially when that meaning can be misunderstood. I often look at my two-year-old daughter and wonder how language is going to shape her identity. Is she going to be Chinese American or American Chinese? At some point every word, every sentence will become a puzzle piece that she’ll try fitting into some mosaic of her daily experiences for her to have her own answer. My goal is to introduce her to as much literature as humanly possible in a short amount of time, praying that the reading will sharpen her analytical skills, enabling her to recognize patterns and motivations so that she can more easily illuminate the hidden subtext of her life. So that when someone says to her, “You’re reading too much into it,” she’ll be equipped with the appropriate skill sets to negotiate her identity within any environment.
In my journey as a creative writing student, I’ve taken more time to grasp how literacy empowers individuals with agency. My delayed realization has gifted me a unique perspective on the power of language. It’s not just about reading words on a page; it’s about finding my voice, expressing thoughts and beliefs, and moving in the world with confidence. I can’t wait for the day I can start to share some of my favorite pieces of literature with my daughter, Future Home of a Living God (Louise Erdrich), Kindred (Octavia Butler), & Unabashed Gratitude (Ross Gay). It’s a list that needs adding to, but I have time to add to her library. It’s those books that showed me the power of words and how they can leave lasting impressions.
Words are a reflection. Spoken, read, heard, recited, or sung, words spread globally. We can speak inclusively, exclusively, fearfully, happily, and frustratedly. When we recognize the strength of understanding the connotations of words, we become better listeners and therefore better communicators. But first, let’s learn to be kind to ourselves, use words within our inner dialogue to attract the language that allows us to reflect a positive environment.
Meet the blogger:
TRAVIS HENDERSHOT is a poet who is recovering from working in manufacturing for a decade.
Harnessing the Power of the Absurd
Writing inspiration can come from so many sources, but what about from your own subconscious?
It’s easier (and more fun) than you might think. The Surrealists were notorious for using their subconscious minds as a way to inform their creative process. Their methods often took the form of parlor games—simple drawing or writing activities that could be played with a small group of friends. Oftentimes, the work that resulted from these games was nonsensical, bizarre, or just downright absurd. But that isn’t always a bad thing! Sometimes allowing yourself to write in the realm of the absurd and to create unusual, unrefined work can be a great way of approaching ideas from a new angle and finding directions to take your writing in that you may have never thought of otherwise.
Let’s explore some of the various games played by the Surrealists, and how they can be applied to your writing:
The Exquisite Corpse
This is perhaps the most famous Surrealist parlor game of all. For writers, this is played by writing a few sentences, covering most of what you’ve written up so that only the last sentence or so is visible, and then passing your work on to the next player. As the game goes on, a story is assembled between writers who have only a limited understanding of what everybody else wrote. As a result, the story can take rapidfire logical twists and turns, contradict itself multiple times over, or introduce bizarre characters and events. When you’re done, you can either accept your finished Exquisite Corpse as a self-contained story, or you can always go back and write further drafts inspired by the story you created, expanding upon elements you enjoyed and getting rid of elements you didn’t care for as much. Give it a try!
This game can also be played by drawing rather than writing—in this version, the first player draws a picture on part of a piece of paper, folding it over so that only a small portion of what they drew is visible, and then passes it on. The process is repeated until the drawing is done, at which point the players can unfold the paper and see their finished creation! This version of Exquisite Corpse can also be played online, on websites such as Monsterland.
Automatic Writing / Automatism
This game has a much simpler premise, and can be played solo. The goal of automatic writing is to write completely without restrictions, just putting words onto paper without considering narrative or logical order. This is a form of spontaneous creation that the Surrealists were very interested in, as they believed that it allowed them to access a purer, less diluted form of the creative subconscious. (You may be starting to pick up a few commonalities in what the Surrealists were into by now). You can start with a prompt, a particular image, a feeling—whatever strikes you. This can be a very useful method for generating lots of ideas which you can later revisit and expand upon in future pieces. Plus, it can be intimidating to try and “nail it” on your first draft, which is why this technique can be fun and refreshing!
Similar to the Exquisite Corpse, automatism can be applied to writing, drawing, or both!
Dada Poetry
Though this technique is rooted in Dada and not Surrealism, the two movements were closely interconnected and shared many creative aims regarding the deconstruction of rational thought and logic (although certainly not without differences in approach). This particular technique was practiced by Tristan Tzara, one of the pioneers of the Dada movement.
For this, you’ll need any piece of printed writing that you don’t mind sacrificing in the name of art. A newspaper article, page from a magazine, or even some of your own writing will do. You’ll need to cut each word out individually, put all of the words in a bag, shake gently, and take them back out, writing them down in the order that you pull them. This expands upon the obscurities of the previous two games by incorporating the element of totally random chance. You may find that your newly scrambled piece of writing might make sense in interesting ways! If you wish, you can even rewrite and reassemble your absurdist poem however many times it takes for you to end up with a piece of writing that you truly love.
Hopefully some of these methods provide you with fresh ideas to explore in your writing practice! Have fun, and remember to keep it weird!
Meet the blogger:
MAX RIDENOUR is a senior at Hamline, majoring in graphic design and minoring in creative writing. They like to keep their hands in many creative pots, between visual art, design work, and involvement in the Twin Cities DIY music scene. Max finds inspiration from many sources, including but not limited to: street art, Studio Ghibli movies, claymation, speculative evolution, and Internet oddities.
“The Horror Renaissance” for Scaredy Cats
I heard mere fragments of my friends watching Smile (2022) from two rooms away and I’ve been sleeping with the lights on since. I loathe being scared. Yet, despite closing my eyes for the monster reveal every time I see a terrifying movie, I can’t seem to stop writing about grieving character arcs and religious trauma allegories driven by sinister creatures. Horror stories pique my morbid curiosity and often make me laugh harder than rom-coms and cry harder than period pieces. In trying to understand my fascinating internal dichotomy, I dove headfirst into the horror genre and discovered what a unique storytelling tool it is. Though it still unsettles me, I’ve come to revere its powerful cultural influence.
Horror has always been much more than blood, guts, and creepy crawly stuff. Since its conception, it’s been experimental and expressive: birthing science fiction and gothic, mixing myth with lore in social commentaries, anchoring cultural shifts, serving as an apparatus to examine historical injustice and cultural flaws, and enabling catharsis by facing collective traumas we’re often overfamiliar with. Horror does these things so well because it is, fundamentally, about making the audience uncomfortable. “When you enter into horror, you’re entering into… your own fear, your own darkest spaces,” writer Carmen Maria Machado explains. “When horror fails, it’s because the writer or director isn’t drawing on those things. They’re just throwing blood wherever and seeing what sticks. But horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you.” Horror writers have to meet the heightened standards of a wary audience. The horror that haunts me with symbolism and abreaction does more than meet those standards; it exceeds them. However, in the mainstream, horror has always been critically and academically undermined. This was only exacerbated by decades of perversion horror faced on the page and screen. Fortunately, that distorted status quo is steadily being remedied thanks to the horror renaissance.
Literary horror is coming back better: as a tool, not just for the therapeutic effect and entertainment of getting the shit scared out of you, but for examining society’s shortcomings and personal trauma with an artistic lens that reframes these things for deeper and further exploration and understanding (a concept dubbed ‘horror vérité’). Crucial to the genre’s renaissance, horror vérité has developed in tandem with what Erika T. Wurth called the “egalitarian” community of authors engaging with horror. Authors who are queer, BIPOC, women, assault survivors, authors with PTSD, and in particular authors from Latin America are writing frightening stories with deeply personal and political messages rooted firmly in their horrifying lived reality. These diverse writers from marginalized communities are here, not to imitate the slasher formula, but to elevate the genre and step back into its psychological roots. On this revamped understanding of how compelling horror is, Machado paraphrased Mariana Enríquez, prolific Latin American horror writer and author of novels Things We Lost in the Fire and Our Share of Night, who said, “In real life… you don’t have the space to have the intensity of feeling that we should have when something horrifying or traumatic happens… [Horror creates] space for the person reading to have the actual emotional response that is appropriate to the thing that just happened.”
I wanted to understand why I felt drawn to horror, allured by the depth it seemed to reach into my mind, even though I still turned away if an unskippable ad for the latest demon-possessed doll movie came on. What I learned is that, ‘fraidy cat or not, I had been sensing the seeds of an influential and captivating genre about to bloom: the unique conventions of re-sensitization, catharsis, and horror vérité utilized by a new wave of insightful writers who have remade horror into a novelty in literature once again. I have always felt innately—and now understand practically—the cornucopia of sincerely profound possibilities that horror creates through the very fear that plagues me. In the moving words of Wurth, “Fear is powerful. If you can understand your fear, even use it to heal through the art you consume or produce—you’re so much further ahead than those who avoid it. Even if you’ll never completely understand it.”
Meet the blogger:
DARBI RENAUD is a student of Hamline University pursuing a BFA in creative writing. She hopes to obtain an MFA in the future. When she’s not writing, she’s usually sleeping with her cat sprawled out on or near her face.
Three Ways to Spice Up Your Romance Writing
Love triangles. They’ve been all the rage recently, due in part to the wild popularity of novels like The Hunger Games and A Court of Thorns and Roses. (For the former, the brilliance of how the love triangle works is better explained in tumblr posts by users @fictionadventurer and @foxmagpie.) They’re a fascinating way of adding a little bit of spice and intrigue to a romance novel, but are also prone to being incredibly formulaic and boring. If you want to try your hand at writing your own version of a love triangle, here’s some interesting twists on the trope to make your story stand out.
- Nobody Gets Together in the End
While romance novels often need a “happily ever after,” switching up that formulaic ending might be what your writing needs. Maybe the stress of all the plot elements spoils romance for the protagonist. Maybe both romantic choices suck in uniquely awful ways and the protagonist realizes they’re better off without either. Maybe both love interests die and the protagonist has to grapple with the great loss of both possibilities. Maybe the protagonist realizes they’re aromantic and have no interest in romance at all, but wishes to make friends with both love interests. Any which way you do it, if at the end of the story the protagonist walks away without a new beau, it’s a wonderful twist on “they get the guy/girl in the end”; not every story that starts as a romance has to end that way!
- Have the Protagonist Cheat
Okay, before you start lighting my funeral pyre, hear me out. Oftentimes, part of the conflict of love triangles comes from the protagonist being unable to choose between two people… what if they think they can have both at the same time? There is a careful line to skate here in making sure that you’re not saying cheating is in any way acceptable—at the same time, the best protagonists are the ones who feel human. They make very human mistakes, have very human lapses in judgment, and furthermore, face very human consequences. How does the drama escalate when the two love interests discover the protagonist has been cheating on them both? How does the protagonist react? Do they apologize? Does this result in something else in the story going wrong? How does the protagonist grow from this, if at all?
- Polyamory
I’ll be completely honest, this has always been my go-to answer for how to solve the issues apparent with love triangles for a long while. Can’t decide? Choose both! Maybe the rivalry between the love interests was a misplaced attraction between the two, or maybe they love the protagonist enough that they’re willing to share them if it makes the protagonist happy. It can be a wonderful opportunity to explore the unique struggles and the unique joys of being in a polyamorous relationship, as well as a chance to explore and critique monogamous relationships.
However you go about writing love triangles, or any story, remember that you are the one telling it—and you are the only one who can tell it in that specific way. By adding your own touches and being passionate about whatever you’re writing about, your readers will respond with the same passion and adore the love and work you put in. Now, get on out there and write in the way only you can.
Meet the blogger:
A.E. GOODMAN is an undergraduate student at Hamline University working for Runestone. A double major in Creative Writing and Anthropology, A.E. enjoys traveling, video games, and storytelling of all kinds. You can find A.E. on Twitter at @AEStargazer or shoot an email to aegoodman01@gmail.com
