Monday Questions: Influences and Inspirations
This week, tell us about some of your favourite writers who have influenced your writing. What is it about their work you like, and how has it affected your writing? Have your influences changed over time? Do you deliberately try and learn from or even imitate elements of other writers' work, or is it mostly subconscious?
Hi Anna,
What a hard set of questions - not helped because it has taken me until Wednesday to find them.
The more I think about this, the less certain I am about actual influences over my writing. I can't say that I imitate a particular author, but only that I have read lots of their works. Just doing that has probably rubbed off somewhere, but it is hard to say what impact all that reading has had on my style or stories.
If I had to put down a few favourites where I have read many books by the same author then I would say the following:
Ian McEwan
Sebastian Faulks
Paul Auster
Salman Rushdie
And then I have a whole host of "foreign" writers i.e. those whose work did not start its days in English:
Umberto Eco
Jose Saramago
Amin Maalouf
Arturo-Perez Reverte
And now as I think harder, there is one particular passage in the book "Three Men in a Boat" where they try to open a tin of pineapple after the discovery that there is no tin opener, finally resorting to using one of the oars, which I have read and re-read so many times and even now as I think about it I start to laugh. That type of humour probably did rub off on some of the things I have written in the past. The story stops short of actually saying what happened with the oar, but shifts to the future when the hat that was being worn and probably saved the man's life, is brought down after dinner and shown around and the story told all over again.
I'm off the find my copy of Three Men in a Boat to read it again.....
I don't believe any one writer influences my work. I am currently reading Nora Roberts / J D Robb (depending on which books I am reading) , and she has a similar style of writing to me, which is probably why I am enjoying reading her at the moment, but I am working my way around our small community library at the moment - Sophia Kinsella is one I am reading, but I jump about, different genre, different styles, different writers.
I do love the classics though, and have a good collection which include Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstien, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, some Shakespeare (love Much Ado About Nothing and Midsummers Night Dream) and Jane Eyre. The reason I like these is their descriptiveness, because they didn't have television or internet to show them what the world looked like, they had to describe it. I vividly remember a page in Jane Eyre where the author describes the wallpaper in one of the rooms.
So while they don't influence my writing, I suppose their work is an example of what I want to aim for, for my stories to become cllassics, or at least very memorable.
I love Jane Eyre too!! I'd love to write a short novel that says a lot, like Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', or Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road', but I haven't found the right idea yet. I also love the novels of the late Beryl Bainbridge - the way she can take the reader into her incredibly vivid, and often strange, worlds in a very economical way is amazing and I'd love to be able to write like that.
With my short stories, Raymod Carver has been a big influence (as he has probably for a lot of short story writers). I like the way he couches profound ideas in simple language.
And for my non-fiction, I'm influenced by travel writers like Colin Thubron and also people who put interesting ideas together like W G Sebald and Iain Sinclair.
My wife always tell me my writing imitates whoever I've been reading most recently. Not in obvious ways, but subtle thought patterns. Mostly subconcious.
On occasion I have conciously tried to immitate Terry Pratchett, Harry Turtledove and Charles Dickens. I guess the all have quite strong styles.