Anne McCaffrey passed away at age 85, and it’s always sad when the world loses a great author. I’d only read one of her books (the first Pern) and liked it well enough, but it was a long time ago and for some reason I responded better to Dune at the time. But I know her work really inspired and affected a lot of readers and future writers, and that’s a powerful thing.
So, it seems a good time to devote some air time to those writers that really affected you, whose work still resonates with you, whose work maybe changed you in some fashion.
I say “one writer,” but that doesn’t really need to be the case. Can be one, can be several.
So: who?
What writers affected you deeply, straight through the heart and clean to the soul?
How? Why? What books? What was the effect of those books?
Honor them here if you are so inclined.
Amber J. Gardner says:
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game made me realize there was more to writing than having a good story idea (I was trying to write a novel that had similar elements and yet the way he approached it was SO MUCH BETTER). I was humbled, BIG TIME…and depressed.
Still, a good lesson to learn.
November 25, 2011 — 5:47 AM
Ron Dionne says:
First writer I read that made me think “I want to do this” is Ray Bradbury. I was a kid. Later it was Patricia Highsmith, David Goodis, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson.
But mostly Highsmith — the clinical, pedestrian, understated explication of crazy and disturbed.
November 25, 2011 — 11:35 AM
Anne Lyle says:
I think I’d have to say Ursula K LeGuin.
1) Way way back in the 1970s, there was a BBC programme called “Jackanory”, on which actors read MG/YA books, including “The Wizard of Earthsea”
2) In my early teens, my best friend and I were inspired by Le Guin’s YA fiction (amongst others) to create our own futuristic worlds and languages
3) Le Guin’s book of essays “The Language of the Night” was a big influence on my critical understanding of the fantasy genre, and led to a lifelong love of “The Worm Ouroboros” by E R Eddison
4) “The Left Hand of Darkness” opened my eyes to soft SF and gender issues, which pervade my own writing to this day
November 25, 2011 — 4:25 PM
Andrew LONGHOFER says:
E. B. White and, though they seem at odds, Christopher Hitchens and C. S. Lewis.
I’ve been a Strunk and White boy from the time I first picked up “Elements of Style.” I recognize the book’s grammatical limitations and its bossy tone, but there’s something wonderful about the elegance of their style advice that moves me and pushes me to be a better writer. I love the thought of the paragraph as the logical unit, rather than the sentence; it forces the writer’s and the reader’s attention span to grapple with entire ideas, rather than merely parts of them and improves the coherence of a piece. Before I read them, I could spit up marvelous sentences, but they always seemed disjoined somehow.
C. S. Lewis has some tremendous things to say about human nature, the way we fall into evil, and how to avoid it. Even outside of a mainstream Christian sensibility, his ideas apply to general morality.
Hitchens empowered me to ask questions of everything I had once thought beyond inquiry. This spirit of openness, of challenge, and of intellectual freedom pervades my thoughts and has shaped my spiritual and artistic life. I have not abandoned religion because of his writings, but have come instead to a more integrated and nuanced understanding of it.
November 25, 2011 — 5:43 PM
Alisha Miller says:
I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember. And I’ve read a lot of good books. But I must say, Neil Gaiman was a total game changer for me. He made me realize that it was okay that the things I want to write don’t really fit in a category. His work, especially American Gods, changed the way I look at writing.
November 25, 2011 — 5:47 PM
Alex J. Kane (@AlexJKane) says:
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. No single work, and no single author, has had the kind of impact that Fight Club had on not only my own writing, but my entire worldview. The way Palahniuk reshapes your familiar reality into something utterly alien — and, in its plausibility, terrifying — is the true mark of his genius.
Choke may in fact be a superior novel, an example of what Fight Club did as a narrative done even better, but Fight Club has attained the level of cult-classic, explosive debut for a reason.
Whether you like Fincher’s film adaptation or not, anyone wanting to write owes it to herself/himself to read Palahniuk’s book.
November 26, 2011 — 6:45 PM
CB says:
William Faulkner, senior year of high school, _The Sound and the Fury_. It was impossible, but brilliant. I loved it. Then I read his Nobel acceptance speech. He changed the way I think of art.
Then it was Eddings. Then Weiss & Hickmann, then Gaiman.
November 26, 2011 — 8:10 PM
Arizela says:
Stephen Donaldson, Robert McCammon, Anne McCaffrey, and Robin McKinley were mine. They changed everything from how I eat steak (nothing gets you over the whole aversion to pink meat like a werewolf in a concentration camp living on rat brains to survive) to turning me into the heroine of my own story and allowing me to escape an abusive, soul-devouring childhood and turn into a reasonably normal human being. At least I think I’m reasonably normal. I do write, though, so it might be open to interpretation.
November 26, 2011 — 9:05 PM
JShanahan says:
Late to the party, as always. However:
Put me down as another writer who read Douglas Adams and wondered how he was doing it. And by “it” I mean taking phrases like “hung in the air much the way bricks don’t” and making them work. Amazing sense of rhythm that I had to learn to cultivate. Also read a lot of National Lampoon in the late 70s/early 80s, so I caught a fever from young smartasses like John Hughes (yep, the director-guy) and Gerry Sussman–but the one whose tone really got into me was PJ O’ORourke. There may never be an essay quite as style-forming as “How To Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”
November 28, 2011 — 12:25 PM
MC Zanini says:
So it happens that the author who changed everything for me is a native English speaker, otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering you with my ramblings.
Edgar Allan Poe. Even translated into Portuguese, it’s powerful stuff. My favorite short stories: “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Oval Oortrait”. The thing that got me: mystery packed with a mighty punch, right to the guts.
(Later — much, much later –, when I was at college, a nice and brilliant lecturer from Universidade de São Paulo showed me how crafty Poe’s prose was, and that only made me love his stories even more.)
And, if you guys would like to venture into a wee more “international” literature, maybe you’d like to try these Brazilian authors, who have shaped the reader in me (some of them have been translated into English): Machado de Assis (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), Raduan Nassar (A Glass of Rage) , Lygia Fagundes Telles (Tigrela and other Stories), Graciliano Ramos (Barren Lives), and João Guimarães Rosa (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands).
November 28, 2011 — 1:14 PM