Anime Made Me Forget How to Write

A stellar art form, layered with inspiration and beauty. An art form that attacked me as much as it helped me. With all things, writers face the double-edged sword: inspiration or insecurity?

I may have grown up wanting to be a novelist, but that doesn’t mean I grew up only reading. I, like many millennials growing up in India, had little exposure to the art of anime; only through specific friends and family that had traveled and were aware of the rest of the world’s doings. All of us have that one vivid personality - whether we spent too much time with them or not - that introduced us to that special thing that we carry with us years, even decades later. A cousin of mine introduced me to anime through a bit of post 10PM programming on a TV channel called AXN; it isn’t a show I’d watch today, but I remember it with more detail than I would care for. Fushigi Yugi, or Curious Play: a romantic drama spanning seasons’ worth of story revolving around two schoolgirls being whisked away into a book about medieval China. Immediately, even as a child, there was a sense of freedom I sensed. I was consuming something I hadn’t seen before. Sure, I had been that eager kid after school waiting for Pokemon and Beyblade on Cartoon Network at five, but this, from its peculiar art style to obvious references to a culture I didn’t understand, demanded all my attention. It turned out to be something that would follow me all my life: a double-edged sword that cut as well as empowered me.

I found myself scouring the internet for more recommendations. Asking all the anime-consuming people I knew (of which, there were hardly any) became a habit before I located the endless forums of information on sites like Tumblr. I found the obvious ones easily: Tsugumi Ohba’s Death Note, the traditional gateway drug into anime, had me downloading episode after episode, prompting my very first anime binge. Thirty-seven episodes later, I was questioning everything I had watched and read. Why hadn’t I been doing this all this while?

The happy obsession continued, permeating through years of school, college, and my work life. At thirty years of age, I am no less engaged by anime as I was when I began. In fact, the older I get, the more appreciative of brilliant writing I am, and the more fierce my love for an art that, since then, has grown exponentially. For a lover of science-fiction, Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira plummeted me into the wormhole of dystopian worlds well before I encountered wonderful writers like Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, and Frank Herbert. In fact, when I realized how vital Shirow was to the rising cyberpunk aesthetic in the 80s, I temporarily abandoned all literary pursuits to chase after this revelation. Nothing swayed me but for the discovery of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli: another wormhole of all things beautiful and soulful.

This double-edged sword of being anime obsessed and being a writer at the same time is hard to explain; the positives sound much like the negatives, if there are any. As an art that ties itself to the ethereal world of animated frames, it can be anything, making it an endless tool for inspiration. Samurai dramas like Rurouni Kenshin made me want to write out scenarios in Edo-period Japan. Political, futuristic, high-technology conflicts like Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Gundam franchise (particularly Gundam 00) inspired stories of space exploration and reconfigured world maps, teaching me how to measure emotional character journeys with overarching plots. Naoki Urusawa’s Monster frightened and disturbed me, and truly introduced psychological thrillers into my writing vocabulary. Shin Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop taught me restraint in storytelling like no other story will, through its jazz-injected episodes across new planets and dystopian scenarios. Hideaki Anno taught me through Neon Genesis Evangelion that childish struggles and muted emotions could turn into heartbreaking tragedies. Only much later did I realise that I had begun to see the world in an animated view, and my stories were structured not like novels should be structured, but rather arranged in a way an anime would use a hundred episodes to deliver the kind of impact that hurts.

The two issues - abstract influence and episodic writing - had significant consequences. The first pulled me into a world too abstract for my writing brain to translate to a reader. I was unfettered by reality as much as possible; and it directly impacted what I was writing. I had come up with a relatively simple story to enter into a novel writing competition on a website: an old man retraces his dead wife’s steps to understand her better. The tale was one of travel and self-discovery, where the protagonist’s journey to his wife’s hometown modifies not just his view of their relationship but his understanding of the world itself. I was immersed, focused, and willing to write, and write I did. I let the ramblings of my head go on unchecked - an unwise decision for a story that should have remained simple - and discovered too late that I had taken a tangent that was too vague and strange to be interesting. I unveiled a plot line that involved supernatural beings and a parallel timeline, in the effort to connect it to the old man’s journey. What I did, in contrast, was write gibberish about mystical forests and animals before returning to the central conflict. The obvious reliance on visual spectacle over character depth showed. With the submission deadline approaching, I concluded the novel with everything but flair and satisfaction. When I read the hundred and twenty odd pages, it sounded very much like a combination of mysteriously vague things: things that were deep, philosophical symbols but came off as surface-level attempts at layered storytelling. I had become so concerned with the visual medium that I was convinced I was writing an anime even though I wasn’t: and this made me concoct things that ideally did not belong in the story.

The second problem - an episodic writing style being employed in a novel - showed up numerous times, and usually when I watched long-running anime creations like One Piece or something smaller, like Fullmetal Alchemist. Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, a behemoth of writing, began in 1997 and released its 111th volume - that’s 1129 chapters - two months ago this year. In the anime format, that’s 1111 episodes, and a total runtime (so far) of twenty thousand, four hundred and seven minutes. One Piece excels at foreshadowing, giving watchers a glimpse of something in episode 144 and delivering its true meaning almost nine hundred episodes later; and it works, and how.

Writing in an episodic fashion is an extremely pleasing feeling. There’s nothing more satisfying than exploring the world you’ve built; taking time in fleshing out details about every building, every leaf, every system is what makes it worthwhile. Writing in an episodic fashion without realizing it makes that aspect even worse; I was waxing eloquent about street lamps and facade architecture like every word was paying me. At the same time, I was under-delivering on my story’s main promises. My characters weren’t fleshed out enough; not because I didn’t know how, but because I was doing it at such a slow pace. I was fleshing each thing out with immense foreshadowing, trying to spread my ideas over more pages than they should be on. I was treating each chapter intrinsically like an episode would be planned, and though they felt part of the same world, they did not feel connected.

Perhaps like all creative mediums, anime teaches a writer what to write as much as what not to, or perhaps how not to. The same way beautiful writing can inspire you, but also wear you down with self-doubt. I’m not sure what kind of writer I’d be if it wasn’t for anime, just as I am unsure of the person I would be without the stories I’ve read. The things we love sometimes show us the messy, the sad, and the real: and somehow, we’re meant to take them as lessons. Anime showed me the writer I was not, and while that is mildly hurtful (debilitating, frankly), at least there’s a new series to watch while I cry about it.