And since I've discussed reader, now on to writers. Are there any writers you consider to be your inspirtation or that you aspire to be like in some way? How did they inspire you?
Ah, I was going to post something like this! ;) Saves me some time now, heh.
In the horror genre, growing up I read mostly male writers. So it was a pleasure to be browsing the paperback table at the library about ten years ago and come across SK Epperson. I don't write much like her, but what a wonderful find to read a good horror writer who's a woman. Sadly, she hasn't put anything new out in just as long.
I wish that I could sustain suspense as well as she does.
Robert McCammon is probably my biggest inspiration, not only because he's one of the best writers out there (and a Southern one, to boot), but because an afterword in one of his books. I was having a lot of trouble-- LOT-- finishing a single manuscript, and his afterword touched on that. Reading that he had trouble, too, and had to scrap most of the book before starting over, gave me confidence that eventually I'd finish a novel.
Lastly, Roald Dahl. His style definitely influenced, and encouraged me to keep on with the style that I love to write in.
Of course, the REAL answer is that everyone I've read has inspired me, but that'd take up too much bandwidth.
I guess I could start at the beginning... The first writer I remember admiring is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved her books and wrote my first scathing letter to Michael Landon because I didn't like what the TV series was doing with her work. Having re-read her Little House books as an adult, I admire her work more for having the decency not to sugar-coat things. I just finished a book of her newspaper columns from the teens, twenties, thirties and forties.
As a writer, I would say Robert B. Parker for the way he drives stories with dialogue and his descriptive powers and for his ability to creative 3 separate series that all interact with each other. Dorothy L. Sayers for doing the same, making the mystery an intrusion into the richly developed lives of her characters. Connie Willis for making the everyday seem extraordinary. Donald Bellasario, the television writer and producer, for his ability to create universes and populate them well-drawn continually developing characters who reoccur over and over again, sometimes over the course of a decade. He did this with Magnum P.I., JAG and now NCIS. (What's up with the initial thing?) I think perhaps I've also been influenced by Elizabeth Peter just because she keeps a large universe with a fixed time-line revolving. But like Athena said, everyone one I've read has influenced me in one way or another. Sometimes just by reminding me to not do what they've done.
I'm realizing that despite having said I wanted to be a writer before I knew how to read, I didn't spend that much time imagining being one. Writing has always been, as Octavia E. Butler's mother said, the one thing I do better than I do anything else. ("Positive Obsession" in Bloodchild and Other Stories) but I'm not sure I ever knew what to do with this ability besides write term papers, e-mails, and message board posts, until now.
Until I went to college, I read constantly. (I've heard a few "me toos" when I say that. It seems college has a way of stopping people from reading.) However, I don't remember thinking as I read "I'd like to write something like that." I feel like making an exception for James Leo Herlihy, though all I've read by him is Season of the Witch and his collection of short stories A Story that Ends With a Scream. Season is a novel told as a diary, the protagonist a 16 year-old girl. I first read it when I was a 16 year-old girl who kept a diary, and I could picture writing something like that. I don't remember much about the title story of Ends with a Scream, but it gave me that same feeling, that I could imagine writing something like this.
I'm realizing at some point I'll have to brave the dust and read volumes and volumes of old journals. I mean, that's what I wrote for most of my life. I should see if I can make something out of it.
I went through a phase of reading the diaries of Colette, but they didn't inspire me all that much. And I'm afraid that I've read Anais Nin's erotica but not her diaries. And as for Ann Frank, well, tonight Lily Brett (who is the daughter of 2 Auschwitz survivors and was born in a DP camp) said it's only recently that she's stopped reading something about the Holocaust every night before bed. I would have to write a whole essay about why I've stayed away from The Diary of Ann Frank and other Holocaust material. (No, it's not personal. My family came here earlier from Russia to escape the Pogroms.)
The other thing I wrote when I was young besides journals was poetry. I read the poetry of Marge Piercy and Erica Jong because I'd enjoyed their novels, but I didn't like their poetry that much. I prefer the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
Maybe I'll say more about this another time, but for current inspiration I want to mention Sue Lang and Christine W. Murphy even though I still haven't read anything else by them except S.L.'s "The Meateaters" and CWM's "Babysitting" (both in Apex)
I also have to mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes canon. I believe I spent years walking around narrating the events around me in my head in the style of Dr. Watson narrating one of his pal's adventures.
I think college upped my reading quotient, even though I always read a lot. I used to read entire old encylopedias and anything I could pick up at a garage sale. I was always going over my bookmobile limit. But we were probably five miles from the library and never had a car, so it could be quite a haul to carry home books and I had to be selective. I'd just read whatever I checked out eight times. But in college my apartment was right behind the town library and I practically lived there. (They had air conditioning!) The librarians knew me so well, they would just reserve stuff for me because they thought I might enjoy it. And since I really didn't do much socializing in college (I was way too focused on keeping my scholarships and graduating to think about it) I had plenty of time to read. What I find cuts back on my reading is writing. I have a hard time reading fiction when I'm writing. Non-fiction isn't really a problem. But something has to really good now for me to shut off the writing mechanism and concentrate on the intake of literature. It's really the same with TV. I'm a born fan-girl, but I can't even follow my soaps now. I only bother to obsess about Lost these days.
I want to ad James Thurber to my list of authors I read that made me think about writing. I think my mom had Further Fables For Our Time at home, and I liked that, so I checked out everything else I could find by him from the library.
As for my current reading/writing habits, I have a nice little routine worked out. I read on the subway, to and from work. I write during lunch, either at this deli with tables that would make a library jealous, or on a bench in the park by the Brooklyn courts. (I write at home on my computer too. Sometimes I even manage to read at home)
I actually can write quite a bit on my laptop while I watch not-to-demanding TV like Food Network or So You Think You Can Dance. I like background noise. Although, I can get a lot done if I go to Flea Market with my husband and put myself in a corner with my computer. I always physically write with a computer, though I often write whole chapters in my head, including a lot of dialogue before putting them down. My husband says when he hears me jabbering away to myself in the bathtub, he knows I'm on a roll. Or sometimes he says my eyes will start looking at stuff he knows isn't there and he knows I'm working in my head while pretending to pay attention to my surrounding.
The reason I mentioned "The Meateaters by Sue Lang and "Babysitting" by Christine W. Murphy is to me those stories are a kind of women's sci-fi, though maybe not by the usual definition. In "Meateaters" all the characters are women who work in a meat processing plant, in a world where men seem peripheral. Why they're peripheral was one of the many questions the story left me pondering, though not really the most interesting one. "Babysitting" is IMHO about women's justice at its most deliciously brutal. I'll add to those "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls" by Nebula and Hugo award-winning Nancy Kress, in July Asimov's. It's the strong working class woman's voice of the narrator that makes me include this story in my women's sci-fi category. Hmm, if it's a subgenre, I think it needs a better name.
10 comments:
Ah, I was going to post something like this! ;) Saves me some time now, heh.
In the horror genre, growing up I read mostly male writers. So it was a pleasure to be browsing the paperback table at the library about ten years ago and come across SK Epperson. I don't write much like her, but what a wonderful find to read a good horror writer who's a woman. Sadly, she hasn't put anything new out in just as long.
I wish that I could sustain suspense as well as she does.
Robert McCammon is probably my biggest inspiration, not only because he's one of the best writers out there (and a Southern one, to boot), but because an afterword in one of his books. I was having a lot of trouble-- LOT-- finishing a single manuscript, and his afterword touched on that. Reading that he had trouble, too, and had to scrap most of the book before starting over, gave me confidence that eventually I'd finish a novel.
Lastly, Roald Dahl. His style definitely influenced, and encouraged me to keep on with the style that I love to write in.
Of course, the REAL answer is that everyone I've read has inspired me, but that'd take up too much bandwidth.
I'd forgotten about Roald Dahl. He's one of my favorites as well.
I guess I could start at the beginning... The first writer I remember admiring is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved her books and wrote my first scathing letter to Michael Landon because I didn't like what the TV series was doing with her work. Having re-read her Little House books as an adult, I admire her work more for having the decency not to sugar-coat things. I just finished a book of her newspaper columns from the teens, twenties, thirties and forties.
As a writer, I would say Robert B. Parker for the way he drives stories with dialogue and his descriptive powers and for his ability to creative 3 separate series that all interact with each other. Dorothy L. Sayers for doing the same, making the mystery an intrusion into the richly developed lives of her characters. Connie Willis for making the everyday seem extraordinary. Donald Bellasario, the television writer and producer, for his ability to create universes and populate them well-drawn continually developing characters who reoccur over and over again, sometimes over the course of a decade. He did this with Magnum P.I., JAG and now NCIS. (What's up with the initial thing?) I think perhaps I've also been influenced by Elizabeth Peter just because she keeps a large universe with a fixed time-line revolving. But like Athena said, everyone one I've read has influenced me in one way or another. Sometimes just by reminding me to not do what they've done.
I'm realizing that despite having said I wanted to be a writer before I knew how to read, I didn't spend that much time imagining being one. Writing has always been, as Octavia E. Butler's mother said, the one thing I do better than I do anything else. ("Positive Obsession" in Bloodchild and Other Stories) but I'm not sure I ever knew what to do with this ability besides write term papers, e-mails, and message board posts, until now.
Until I went to college, I read constantly. (I've heard a few "me toos" when I say that. It seems college has a way of stopping people from reading.) However, I don't remember thinking as I read "I'd like to write something like that." I feel like making an exception for James Leo Herlihy, though all I've read by him is Season of the Witch and his collection of short stories A Story that Ends With a Scream. Season is a novel told as a diary, the protagonist a 16 year-old girl. I first read it when I was a 16 year-old girl who kept a diary, and I could picture writing something like that. I don't remember much about the title story of Ends with a Scream, but it gave me that same feeling, that I could imagine writing something like this.
I'm realizing at some point I'll have to brave the dust and read volumes and volumes of old journals. I mean, that's what I wrote for most of my life. I should see if I can make something out of it.
I went through a phase of reading the diaries of Colette, but they didn't inspire me all that much. And I'm afraid that I've read Anais Nin's erotica but not her diaries. And as for Ann Frank, well, tonight Lily Brett (who is the daughter of 2 Auschwitz survivors and was born in a DP camp) said it's only recently that she's stopped reading something about the Holocaust every night before bed. I would have to write a whole essay about why I've stayed away from The Diary of Ann Frank and other Holocaust material. (No, it's not personal. My family came here earlier from Russia to escape the Pogroms.)
The other thing I wrote when I was young besides journals was poetry. I read the poetry of Marge Piercy and Erica Jong because I'd enjoyed their novels, but I didn't like their poetry that much. I prefer the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
Maybe I'll say more about this another time, but for current inspiration I want to mention Sue Lang and Christine W. Murphy even though I still haven't read anything else by them except S.L.'s "The Meateaters" and CWM's "Babysitting" (both in Apex)
I also have to mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes canon. I believe I spent years walking around narrating the events around me in my head in the style of Dr. Watson narrating one of his pal's adventures.
I think college upped my reading quotient, even though I always read a lot. I used to read entire old encylopedias and anything I could pick up at a garage sale. I was always going over my bookmobile limit. But we were probably five miles from the library and never had a car, so it could be quite a haul to carry home books and I had to be selective. I'd just read whatever I checked out eight times. But in college my apartment was right behind the town library and I practically lived there. (They had air conditioning!) The librarians knew me so well, they would just reserve stuff for me because they thought I might enjoy it. And since I really didn't do much socializing in college (I was way too focused on keeping my scholarships and graduating to think about it) I had plenty of time to read. What I find cuts back on my reading is writing. I have a hard time reading fiction when I'm writing. Non-fiction isn't really a problem. But something has to really good now for me to shut off the writing mechanism and concentrate on the intake of literature. It's really the same with TV. I'm a born fan-girl, but I can't even follow my soaps now. I only bother to obsess about Lost these days.
I want to ad James Thurber to my list of authors I read that made me think about writing. I think my mom had Further Fables For Our Time at home, and I liked that, so I checked out everything else I could find by him from the library.
As for my current reading/writing habits, I have a nice little routine worked out. I read on the subway, to and from work. I write during lunch, either at this deli with tables that would make a library jealous, or on a bench in the park by the Brooklyn courts. (I write at home on my computer too. Sometimes I even manage to read at home)
I actually can write quite a bit on my laptop while I watch not-to-demanding TV like Food Network or So You Think You Can Dance. I like background noise. Although, I can get a lot done if I go to Flea Market with my husband and put myself in a corner with my computer. I always physically write with a computer, though I often write whole chapters in my head, including a lot of dialogue before putting them down. My husband says when he hears me jabbering away to myself in the bathtub, he knows I'm on a roll. Or sometimes he says my eyes will start looking at stuff he knows isn't there and he knows I'm working in my head while pretending to pay attention to my surrounding.
The reason I mentioned "The Meateaters by Sue Lang and "Babysitting" by Christine W. Murphy is to me those stories are a kind of women's sci-fi, though maybe not by the usual definition. In "Meateaters" all the characters are women who work in a meat processing plant, in a world where men seem peripheral. Why they're peripheral was one of the many questions the story left me pondering, though not really the most interesting one. "Babysitting" is IMHO about women's justice at its most deliciously brutal. I'll add to those "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls" by Nebula and Hugo award-winning Nancy Kress, in July Asimov's. It's the strong working class woman's voice of the narrator that makes me include this story in my women's sci-fi category. Hmm, if it's a subgenre, I think it needs a better name.
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