What Writers Have Influenced Me?

March 8, 2023

I enjoy thinking about the writers who have influenced me, because it takes me back to the excitement and pleasure I experienced when first encountering them, then digging deeper into their works. It reminds me of the kind of writing that made me want to be a writer too.

As a voracious young reader, I waded early into the hardback Howard Garis Uncle Wiggly books in my grandparents’ den, which contained intricate and colorful depictions of “the gentleman rabbit” on his many escapades. From there I became deeply involved with The Hardy Boys and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan adventure books. I also read a lot of baseball biographies, as great chunks of my mental time were consumed with all-things baseball, and I considered it a certainty that I was going to end up in the Big Leagues.

As a pre-teen, sadly resigned to my mediocre baseball skills, I recall Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson firing my imagination, along with Jules Verne. I also began developing a taste for science fiction — alien invasions, flying to Mars, ray guns, that kind of thing.

The first “serious” book I read was Hawaii, by James Michener, when I was 15. It made a big impression on me. I know Michener is now considered by some to be only slightly more than an airport-book writer, but I found his approach in Hawaii fascinating and inspiring — geologic spans of time, story lines spanning centuries, a huge cast of characters.

I was extremely fortunate to attend an amazing high school in my Junior and Senior years. There, I found myself in the company of Billy Budd and Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, The Canterbury Tales, poets like Poe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and even a smidge of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In my Senior year we spent considerable time on Greek tragedies.

The summer after graduating, I did construction work and read Crime and Punishment, The Old Man and the Sea, and Babbit.

By then, I was hooked on books and, more importantly, the idea of writing books.

As I began to toy with writing my own stories, and looking back on those early steps, I was influenced by an odd pair: Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Hemingway’s prose seemed almost hypnotic in its simplicity. It seemed to make writing so incredibly simple — why, a 5th grader could write like that! Not true, of course — but I spent a lot of time aping his style, before shaking it, almost like shaking an addiction. Now, Thomas Wolfe — talk about a writing style! I’d never read anything like his pure, unfiltered gush of words! His ability to tease vivid color and emotion out of words. There is something truly beautiful about many of his passages — but the more I read, the less it seemed to add up to. And mimicking his style became even more preposterous than mimicking Hemingway. Both, I came to conclude, were distinctive and noteworthy in separate ways, but limited as writers.

In the end, I think I’ve come to be most influenced by writers like John Steinbeck, Paulette Giles, and Larry McMurtry – writers with a deceptive ordinariness to their prose, and the more accessible for it. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t write as wonderfully as Fitzgerald, though, if I could!

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