Your Top Five Influences

Bone2pick

Bone2pick

New Member
If you’re like me, you could, without much effort, rattle off more than a dozen influences. But I thought it might be a fun exercise, as well as a nod to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, to limit this thread to five. I’ve stuck with authors for my list, but if another type of artist colors your writing — a musician or film director, for instance — you’re welcome to include those. And if you’d prefer to cite a specific work or series, as opposed to a person — for example, Little House on the Prairie or The Twilight Zone — feel free to do that.


My list, in alphabetical order:

1) Aaron Dembski-Bowden. He’s best known for writing Warhammer 40k novels for Black Library. Helsreach, Soul Hunter, The First Heretic, and The Master of Mankind are my favorites from him. In my estimation, the guy was born to write grimdark. There’s a delicious edge to seemingly everything on his page. And he has a remarkable ability for writing villainous main characters.

2) David Gemmell. In contrast to ADB, Gemmell’s fantasy novels stress romantic heroism. He offers adventures full of honor and sacrifice and redemption. Waylander, Legend, and The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend are all near and dear to my heart.

3) Geoff Johns. A superhero comic book writer. His DC Comics work on Green Lantern, Hawkman, and Aquaman are all solid examples of classic superhero goodness. And each of those runs raised the profile of those B and C-tier characters among the fandom. That’s no small feat. Johns has a knack for understanding the appeal of the heroes and villains he works with.

4) Jack London. I love his prose. I marvel at how he masterfully weaves his themes throughout his character arcs. I wish I had the ability to write stories like The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Martin Eden. He’s long been an inspiration.

5) Jeff Shaara. As far as I’m concerned, His Civil War historical fiction novels are a triumph of literature. And his book featuring Teddy Roosevelt delivers everything it should. Unlike the first three influences I’ve listed, Shaara’s characters aren’t larger than life. Quite the opposite, in fact. He continually reminds his readers of his characters’ limitations, and allows them to fail, just like real people do. His stories, while often grand in scale, exude a sterling verisimilitude.


I’m surprised an author from the western genre didn’t make my list. Almost, but I (sadly) couldn’t squeeze one on. Anyway, it’s your turn, forum. Let’s see your top five! :)
 
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1. Dante
2. Mel Brooks (I know, he does movies, not books.)
3. Hiromu Arakawa (Writer of Fullmetal Alchemist)
4.You Higuri (Writer of Cantarella, a historical fantasy manga)
5. Bram Stoker and George RR Martin for pacing and details.
Bonus: Araki (writer of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)
 
This will be quite a random mix, but I hope people don't make too much fun out of me for this list.

1. My mum (she sadly left 5 years ago and a major reason why I want others to read my stories- she has an incredible life story.)
2. Haruki Murakami (Japanese author)
3. Hayao Miyasaki (Studio Ghibli)
4. Jay Chou (Taiwanese Pop Icon & Singer)
5. Aesop (Philosopher)
 
Bone2pick said:
1) Aaron Dembski-Bowden. He’s best known for writing Warhammer 40k novels for Black Library. Helsreach, Soul Hunter, The First Heretic, and The Master of Mankind are my favorites from him.! :)
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I'm still torn up about Argel Tal and Raum! And I'm still waiting for a Decimus book!

1. Michael Moorcock
2. J G Ballard.
3. Julian May
4. Richard Adams - specifically Watership Down (book and movie, both)
5. Poul Anderson
 
1) John Steinbeck - I read Of Mice and Men when I was in 5th grade and my sister brought it home from school. It taught me how to be the most effective at making your reader hate you. just kidding-ish

It's such a short book and he packs so much in there. He shows you everything you need to know about the characters, makes you feel sorry for them, understand them, love them, and even how you can feel just as bad for the murderer as the one being murdered. That’s really stuck with me.

2) Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear - My grandmother started taking me to the bookstore once a week when I was 10. Mostly in a bid to make me stop reading my mom's romance novels (it didn't work) but she'd let me pick out anything I wanted that didn't "look" bad to her. I was 12 I think when I saw People of the Wolf. I love wolves, I'm part Native American, and it was almost 500 pages so it would last a few days - it seemed like a good choice. It was magical. I read them all. People find them to be very slow and dry and history heavy, but dude I loved them. How they could take a couple of little artifacts and then create an entire world around the relevancy of them. Make them, and the people who touched them, come alive. And, of course, there was a lot of shit in them that if grandma knew she'd never ever let me touch another, but she wasn't much of a reader.

3) Cormac McCarthy - I know he tends to be very polarizing due to his punctuation quirks, structure, etc. but I adore him. The Road specifically will always have a very special place in my heart and I can't honestly even tell you why. I don't know. It's the most tragically beautiful book I've ever read. I know, I know, it's dark. Dark dark. But it's also beautiful. *shrug*

4) Nora Roberts - Nora Roberts is a romance writer, for those who don't know, and as you might guess based on #2 above, one of my mom's favorites. Without being sappy and woe is me I'll just say - I had a real shitty childhood and there weren't a lot of examples of what love and respect really looked like. Sure romance novels are typically escapism and fantasy, but the foundation of what those things look like are true regardless. And, not for nothing, she's written 200+ novels, over multiple pen names, and is still kicking them out. She's quite formulaic but somehow still manages to make you give a shit about her characters every time. At least in all the ones I've read.

5) S.E. Hinton - The Outsiders is another I read in 5th grade and I really identified with the whole 'outsider' thing. It had everything - an unconventional family, trauma, neglect, all the things.

Apparently, 5th grade-ish is mostly when I realized how much I could love a book and disappear into it.
 
There are no writers who influence me. Strange, I know. But then again, if you've read my writing, it makes sense. And honestly, I don't know any writer I write similar to (if you've got ideas, let me know). My writing style is influenced by music, particularly certain artists I listen to. Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Joy Division, Kate Bush, Steely Dan, Tom Waits

Other albums have influenced me as well: Little Earthquakes (Tori Amos); Tim (The Replacements), Starfish (The Church), and Lonesome Crow (Scorpions), among a few that I can think of off the top of me noggin.
 
Disclaimer: I'm separating the art from the artist in at least one of these, and if you know, you know.

1. Neil Gaiman
2. Clive Barker (specifically Weaveworld)
3. Jonathan Safran Foer
4. Ramin Djawadi (he's a composer but gets yearning in such a way)
5. Shakespeare and Garth Nix tie for this spot, although they're all kind of interchangeable on the list.

I'd say there are still more who influence me, but each of the above is based more on turning points in my writing growth.
 
Bone2pick said:
I’m reading Shōgun right now, and though I’m less than 200 pages in, I’m very happy with it. Would you recommend the entire Asian Saga?
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King rat is probably my favourite but they are all okay except whirlwind which is too big and complicated. He wrote a later book called love story which pull just one strand out of whirlwind and is better for it
 
Dogberry's Watch said:
Ramin Djawadi (he's a composer but gets yearning in such a way)
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I love Ramin Djawadi. Also Alexander Rosskopf, LUDEN, and of course Hans Zimmer has some amazing pieces. There are so many excellent composers.

If yearning is your thing, there's a playlist on Spotify called Sad Violin curated by Wander World Music that is a little over 10 hours of all of these composers and more. It's one of my favorite playlists and is phenomenal.
 
Bone2pick said:
I’m reading Shōgun right now, and though I’m less than 200 pages in, I’m very happy with it. Would you recommend the entire Asian Saga?
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Hell, yes. I've only read the big 3: Shogun, Tai-pan, and Noble House, but they're all great.

My top 5 in order of discovery:

1. Stephen King
2. Tom Clancy
3. Hemingway/Faulkner
4. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Cormac McCarthy

I devoured King and Clancy in my teens when I first began writing. Everything I did was based on that. Hemingway/Faulkner are an amalgam to me because I read them simultaneously, literally alternately reading chapters of the For Whom the Bell Tolls and a book of Faulkner stories my mom had. That introduced me to classic literary American canon and pointed me away from the mass market stuff. Gabriel with 100 Years of Solitude introduced me to vocabulary, sentence structure, and different ways story could be told/framed. Not necessarily the supernatural jam of mystic realism exactly, but the way settings, emotions, and POVs could work together in non-standard ways.

And then Cormac McCarthy came along like 15 years later like a shower shanking and turned everything I thought I knew about writing upside down.

It was very difficult for me to leave Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tolkien, and Clavell off the list, but I discovered those after I was deep into writing and more influenced by my own ideas than others. Until Cormac. My head is still spinning.
 
In rough order of impact on how I do things:

Terry Pratchett - Specifically Discworld. One of my absolute favorite works of fiction. I've read all of the main series books, most of them several times, some of them probably on double-digited occasions. I think Discworld has ever so slightly fused with my DNA, so yeah, safe to call it my top influence. I got into the series pretty late in life, and was already writing in a (much inferior) quasi-Pratchett style before then. The main things I've got from Sir Terry is how I do humor, characters, and dialogue, plus how to take existing ideas (as an example, mythology) and recontextualize them. And prose, and interconnected world building, and... Yes, major influence.

Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast series. Probably my favorite prose in all of literature, but then I'm not as well read as some. The language is beautiful, the characters are... beautiful, but also very much not. It's a good bit harder to pin down exactly how Peake has influenced me, as his writing is so ephemeral, but I'd say it's mainly got to do with description, not just of people and places but also more abstract stuff like moods and emotions. The books are clunky and meandering, but in ways where I mean that as a compliment. If nothing else Peake showed me that I owe it to myself to dare to be different, and how much beauty there can be in the grotesquely offbeat.

Joe Abercrombie - I learned a lot about humor here also, there are funnier writers out there but Abercrombie has this wonderful way of catching me off-guard and making me cackle. In addition to some insight into how to be sneaky-obliquey with my jokes, I take a lot of cues from his brilliant characterization, especially interior monologue, as well as pacing and action scenes. The man's also fiendish good at twists and foreshadowing, I'm still studying how he does it.

George R. R. Martin - Long-time fan of the ASoIaF series, started reading those books just after the first season of the TV series, so bit of an older influence than most of these others. I'm fairly obsessed with the setting, it's one of the few things I'm genuinely geeky about anymore. So, George has mainly influenced my world building. There's this sense of layered mysteries and depth and complexity I find damn near intoxicating. Also think his characterizations and intrigues are outstanding.

H.P. Lovecraft - I struggled to think of a fifth, so here he is. Not so much a huge fan of the man's writing, though there are some stories I like. I put him up as an influence mostly for the works he would come to inspire. That cosmic horror vibe is just straight-up my jam, and I often inject a good bit of that in my stories. It's delicious stuff.
 
1. The one-page stories I read in primary school (Janet and John series and another I don't remember.) These were hugely influential for me as it gave me an interest in short stories.

2. A sci-fi book with a collection of short stories I read once but I don't remember the name of it.

3. A mate who was also a short story writer and encouraged me to go in for a competition - I was one of the joint winners. That really encouraged me to keep going.

4. Being published in Your Cat Magazine and a CWU (union) magazine not long after the aforementioned competition.

5. People buying my ebooks even if they are not great sellers but I make a few bob from them which has covered the cost of the covers etc.

So, as you an see, my influencers have come from all walks of life.
 
1) Ian McEwan as proxy for romantic-lyrical classical music in general — as well as a writer, he's a composer and aficionado of such "non-genre" music.

From most recent to farthest back, I'd begin with Ian McEwan. It isn't that there are specific stylistic traits I've learned from him, because I've been reading him only since the film of Atonement came out—which was 18 years ago, but feels about like 5 years at my age. Rather, it's his immersion in classical music that probably makes his late-life style resonate with me. And the fact that we share the common influence of that body of music. For me it's primarily the romantic and lyrical composers and works that influence me. My sentences and paragraphs (in fiction, not in other writing) show rhythmic traits directly comparable to such music. It's not a conscious thing; in fact, I only realized it myself after someone asked why I didn't simplify the rhythms (which they called the flow), and I had to think about why I write lyrical text in the way that I do. I don't have examples I can pluck at the moment, but it's analogous to: da Da-da-da-da-dum, da-dum, da-da-dum, da-dum — echoism, partial repetition / reiteration, and non-metronomic pulse — as opposed to a more simple and declarative form. Or as I illustrated it in another essay, "At last, at last, the sleeping baby wakens" which epitomizes musical rhythm.

2) Jörn Donner and 3) John Fowles, both of whose influence on me began in my mid-to-late twenties, well before I actually began writing fiction.

Donner was part of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority culture. Like most Finns of his class, he was a polyglot, conversational in his case in Finnish, Swedish, German, and English—probably some level of French and Russian as well. Most of his work was not published in English. I found him while I was living in Sweden a few years before living even longer in Finland, and his Angela's War (Angelas krig) was the first Swedish-language novel that ever truly appealed to me. Angela was a nursing assistant who first cared for, then befriended, then entered an illicit intimate, conflicted love relationship with a wounded German soldier in the time before Finland expelled the Germans. While there had long been a close and admiring relationship between Finland and Germany, particularly in military circles, the Germans were regarded as a necessary evil in the war against Russia that took place alongside (but was not part of) WWII. Donner was so good at depicting societal truths and attitudes, and intimate relationships. He was also rather cynical about class and the upper classes from which he himself came. Like Finnish writers and artists generally, he believed more in personal than political truth. His work was highly personal (wrt characters) as well as somewhat drawn from his own family and experiences, where Sweden-Swedish fiction at the time was almost entirely political and PC.

John Fowles, of course, and Lawrence Durrell are credited as the anchors (or whatever) of the post-modern literary era we're still writing in today—corresponding, perhaps, to Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the "modern" era that preceded it. Both were innovative in tense, POV, and narrative structure, were impressionistic, improvisational... many of the things we take for granted today. Both introduced frequent metafictional elements such as self-commentary, characters' awareness they're part of a fictional construct, and the like. Fowles even inserted himself as author into a chapter in The French Lieutenant's Woman and himself as actor into the opening scene in the god-awful movie (which even he ended up hating) of his The Magus.

The things I take from Fowles are less high-flown. He's a master of intimate dialogue, a mastery first put on full display in The Magus and perfected in Daniel Martin. I often return to certain sub-stories in The Magus just to recalibrate my ear for dialogue. Like a number of authors of the mid-to-late 1900s, he exemplifies mastery of the tacit rules on name repetition, and is worth studying for that alone. He's good in long passages of free narrative, and slips effortlessly between that mode and scene-written narrative. He's one of the masters of free indirect style. I can't say I love The Magus—neither did he, by the time he'd finished it, or at least by the time he'd written its successors—but I did find it riveting on a first read, and I still go back to learn from it. Apparently I wrote at one time that his Daniel Martin was my favorite novel of all time, unaware that John Gardner either had written or would later write much the same opinion. I've since been puzzled I would have said that, but revisiting DM is like exercise: it's good for me even at the times I don't really have the energy to do it.

Then I guess I'd have to include 3) Ernest Hemingway and 4) John Steinbeck.

They were most influential on me during my high school years.

I liked the dryness and simplicity of Hemingway, who made life itself appear simple. In Steinbeck, I was most drawn to the sweep and the distance from the suburban life I knew. I believe East of Eden was probably the most striking for me, and Cathy Ames the most memorable character. Steinbeck himself hated her, unsurprisingly, but I couldn't help reflecting on the things that made her who she was, beginning with what a physician today would suspect was Swyer syndrome, a complex intersex condition in which a genetic male ends up with a female body that never properly matures into womanhood or even puberty.

Hemingway's greatest fans were probably my parents' generation, who all seemed to fantasize of an alternate life as a Hemingway protagonist or side character instead of being the 1950s-60s teacher or accountant or corporate cog they were. I suppose I had a phase like that around 10th grade. Deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream appealed to me more than being an ambulance driver or an anti-Franco partisan.

==========================
Who didn't make the list?

I can't say that Haruki Murakami has been an actual influence, but I did find in particular Norwegian Wood highly resonant with my own sensibility.

I won't accord this #5—rather, let's call it a dishonorable mention:
In the 9th to 11th grade, the appropriate age if there is one, I was into Ayn Rand. That was helpful in deprogramming me from some memes that were culturally endemic at the time. Not too long afterward, I realized that all she'd done was reverse the polarity on Western moral values while retaining nearly all the same dimensions and discriminators. She was just as moralistic and judgmental as the traumatizing culture she escaped from and the fictional American one she excoriated, beginning with the question of WHY one should have a moral opinion on every person or issue one encounters. Only decades later, after reading Barbara Branden's hagiography of her (and having seen quite a few videos of Rand's appearances) did I realize that Rand was what we would until recently have called Aspergian. As a young child, she never understood why she couldn't mingle naturally with her peers. And it wasn't merely that she was an order of magnitude more intelligent. She never understood and could not predict their reactions. (Later, as an adult, she also showed typically Aspergian gait, eye contact, and social reactions.)(Branden understood none of this, but conveyed much of it unwittingly. I take the rest from video observation.) Nearing adulthood, Rand constructed a worldview redefining her inborn deficit of emotional perception / intelligence as a form of superiority. From there, she gradually evolved into full-blown narcissistic personality disorder, though the tendency had to be present already by her late teens. In some respects she had the unintimidating bourgeois Jewish tastes of her childhood in Bolshevik Russia. It made me more forgiving of her to realize she was this confused, fearful girl of highly conventional values wildly overcompensating in her adult life. It doesn't excuse the harm she did to many young minds, but it does make it possible to feel sorry for her. And the years I spent coming to understand who she really was, and why, certainly inform the way I contemplate characters today, both my own and other writers'.
 
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  1. George R.R. Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire was a big influence on my prose and the reason most of what I write is in Deep 3rd Person POV.
  2. Robert E. Howard: Another massive influence on my prose, particularly when it comes to action scenes. Stuff like the climax of Queen of the Black Coast or The Phoenix on the Sword is so vivid, with this sense of fluid movement and luxurious detail that’s incredibly immersive. I’ve strived to inject that same kind of vibrance into my own work.
  3. David Weber: One of my oldest influences, who I was reading before I’d ever considered writing seriously. Honor Harrington really shaped my approach to military science fiction, but I’ve tried to bring his knack for making even background characters feel fully realized and weaving nuance into all kinds of factions into my work in other genres as well.
  4. Tom King: His introspective, psychological approach to superhero fiction, especially with his run on Batman, sort of crystallized for me how I wanted to structure my own stories in the subgenre. Plus, I think I might’ve picked up a few of his dialogue quirks.
  5. T. Kingfisher: I don’t think I’ve ever read someone better at combining romance and action and humor. Since I’ve made a pivot towards speculative romance with my long-form work, striking a similar balance is something I really want master.
 
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