I signed up for a readers/writers site today – all part of the marketing effort for the novel. If I want people to start taking noticing, I know it’s important for me to participate with them – not so much that I become a nuisance, and certainly not banging the drum for my book every time. I just need to be a valuable member of a few important communities.
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post – I’m going to take a break from marketing today with a little introspection and reflection. One of the questions I had to answer was: Which writers have influenced you the most? As I thought about it, I suddenly realized how much my favorite writers have influenced my novel. I wasn’t aware of it when I was writing, but looking back now – a couple of months after crossing the last i and dotting the last t – I’m beginning to think that it wasn’t my book at all.
This is what I wrote in my profile:
‘As I read back through my novel, I hear echoes of my favorite writers everywhere.
Above all, Hardy and his apprentice Fowles: sympathetic, yet deeply-flawed protagonists; the inevitable tragedy of human relationships, partly predestined, partly caused by human frailty; the quest for an ideal, never realized.
Camus and existentialism: the protagonist separated from society, the outsider – something of Eliot’s Prufrock here too – ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws …’
Lawrence, who never air-brushed sex.
Swift, who taught me satire and political allegory; he showed me how to build parallel microcosms and macrocosms.
Beckett and Pinter: masters of dialog and the disconnected speaker. They made me want to write novels as playscripts. French literature and Joyce helped: they showed that speech doesn’t need speech-marks. And Pratchett proved that dialog rarely needs to be attributed in a well-written story.
Graham Greene and Hemingway: started me on my overseas adventures and taught me that literature needn’t be literary.
Le Carré: taught me that best sellers could be literary.
Hopkins and Joyce: lovers of words just for their shape and sound.
The King James Bible: I may no longer be seduced by its religion but the power and beauty of its morality and its language influence almost everything I write.’
Interesting – almost nothing from the last 50 years. Only Pratchett amongst contemporary writers. That’s probably something to do with my age. For books as with everything else, the deepest impressions are probably made in our teens and twenties. So for me the cut-off point would have been around 1980.
Do any of you feel the same as me? Do you think your writing is heavily influenced by the people you’ve read? Who’s had the most impact on you?
Tags: influences
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I think Pratchett influences everyone who reads him.
For me;
David Gemmell taught me that heroes don’t have to survive to win,
Pratchett taught me that a city can be a character in its own right.
Raymond Chandler taught me the value of a good plot.
That’s all I can think of right now. -
Chris – welcome, and thanks for posting. Pratchett – Ankh-Morpork – a character in its own right. That’s a great insight … I guess the city is more than a bit-player in my novel too – I never thought about it that way till now. Do cities shape the people, or people shape the cities?
I haven’t read Gemmell … but I learnt something from your reference. Wikipedia says he was fired after publishing his third novel for using the names of his colleagues in the book. Way to go – and something I have to try!
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Recently, I have become very aware of how writers influenced me. When I read F. Scott Fitzgerald beyond THE GREAT GATSBY, I actually had to check the web to make sure there wasn’t an author by another name because he felt so ‘now’.
Hemingway: for showing me how simple language is no barrier to delving into the incredible complexity of the human condition.
My currently still writing influences are James Lee Burke, Pete Dexter, Steven Erikson, and R. Scott Bakker, for showing that genre can be even more literary than literary.
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Raymond Chandler. Mainly because I doubt England has produced a better writer (and yes, I did think about that before I wrote it). There is to my mind no better descriptive writer than Chandler.
Patrick O’Brian. For his ability to conjour the past in a way that makes it seem entirely authentic. And George MacDonald Fraser for similar reasons. I also admire the way they both (at times) write 70+ word sentences without breaking sweat, run them consecutively and dare an editor to meddle… both have also written multi-book (12+) series with no loss of quality, which is highly unusual. They also both write stories and relegate the complexities of their characters (and they both have complex characters) to the background. I think they understand something about characterisation that many literary novelists (present company excepted) do not.
Iain (M.) Banks for his dark plots and often surprising twists.
And J.K. Rowling for her self-belief. Her books may be utter drivel but she knew what she was about.
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Was he really? English? You’re always right.
Except about J.K. Rowling. I read old Harry as a reader not a critic. Every single book. Fought the kids to get my hands on them before they did. And loved every one. Just my view.
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Chandler was born in Chicago but was educated in England and became a British subject. His mother was English too (or maybe Irish). Perhaps interestingly I first read all my listed authors when I was in my 30s, save Chandler who I first read in my teens.
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