Your Top Five Influences

[Darkthought]

Lists like this are always so difficult. Sometimes its hard to account for all of our influences but I'll try. Need to get my post count back up anyway.
The order here does not represent ranking.

1. Tolkien - This seems almost like a cop out for anyone writing any kind of fantasy but its unavoidable. This is the guy that got me interested in the craft. I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was in 5th grade and later discovered the Silmarillion in middle school. It was the worldbuilding and specifically his focus linguistics, etymology, and music that really got me. This lead to several years of worldbuilding and very little actual story writing.

2. Christopher Hitchens - At the risk of being labelled a reddit atheist, his journalistic work, irrespective of his sometimes controversial politics or views on religion, is quite good and I recommend Hitch 22 to anyone who has an interest in journalism.

3. John Steinbeck - The greatest American author in my opinion. The way he writes characters and presents conflict is peerless.

4. Robert A. Heinlein - He was to Science Fiction what Tolkien is to fantasy in many ways. An unavoidable influence.

5. Brian Jacques - The Redwall novels carried me through middle school. I don't think he was a particularly skilled writer but one thing he really captured was how to present a world of childlike wonder and whimsy, which I think is undervalued in this sort of deconstructionist era we're in.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

I'm reluctant to cite other authors as influences. Even though most of the ones I really like are dead, they all have active adherents who are quick with the torches and pitchforks should anyone sully the name. Looking back to when I was young, this is what sticks out of what I was reading and,probably arranged how I conceived a written story at a time when I was assembling more brain cells than losing.

1. Enid Blyton. I know, it's all there was when I was a kid. Famous Five Go Fuckedy Fuck With The Secret Seven.
2. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, so wise and so true. Funny too, but still wise and true.
3. Lord of the Rings, usually a slow reader, went through the full trilogy of six books in less than a week.
4. Foundation trilogy of four books. Hand-me-down-when-he's-not-looking, one of my brothers was a big sci-fi fan.
5. I read several of Primo Levi's books as a young man. Profound and so elegantly written.

Writers I admire overall: Steinbeck is right up there; McCarthy, The Road and No Country are powerful and disturbing; Orwell, much less funny than Douglas Adams but still wise and true; The Bluest Eye has to be the bravest debut, and Beloved defies description; Carver, Mansfield and O'Connor for their short stories; James Stephens for making words dance. I could go on, but last, certainly not least, the greatest Irish writer of them all.

 

[Naomasa298]

Famous Five Go Fuckedy Fuck With The Secret Seven.

My school library didn't have that one.

 

[MoonChild]

My school library didn't have that one.

I owned every Famous Five book as a kid, but I never had that one.

 

[Also]

I should have given my spot #5 to Jim Harrison instead of dishonorable mention to Ayn Rand. Harrison was a master of free narrative — artful telling, as it were — not dependent on scene-writing. Revenge, Legends of the Fall, The River Swimmer....

His last name was right there in the planning list I had a a placeholder in my draft, but slipped off when I got distracted on the notion of empathy for the confused little Aspie girl at the core of Rand's personal development.

There's so much that literary writers in particular can learn from Harrison about non-cinematographic writing that is largely free of templates, tropes, over-description, and genrecraft.

In terms of technical influence, I should have given him #1, although all the other names I mentioned influenced me earlier and more in terms of sensibility and vision.