I Write Like
Seeing the "I Write Like" meme on a few of my Friends' pages, I started thinking about who has actually influenced me as a writer. It's not an easy question to answer, and my knee-jerk response to the meme is "I Write Like Myself". However, when I was taking creative writing courses in college my professor (Don Taylor) said my style (such as it was at the time) reminded him of J.D. Salinger, which was probably a reflection of the fact that I was reading Salinger at the time. He also recommended I read Heinrich Böll, because he thought he could see some resemblances there too. Not sure it's a good thing when your writing sounds as though it has been translated into English from German, especially when you don't speak German. At the time I would have preferred to write like Faulkner, but apparently it didn't come out that way.
Around that same era I was an avid reader of the SF and criticism of Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and Thomas Disch, with John Crowley discovered a couple of years later and quickly rising to the same level in my estimation. In another writing class -- a one-on-one class with Linda Robertson -- she had me take a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and replace each noun with a different noun, each verb with a different verb, each adjective with etc, using the resulting paragraph in a piece of my own on a different topic. That was so much fun that I promptly did the same with a Joanna Russ paragraph (from And Chaos Died) for a story I wrote for another Don Taylor class. Russ may well be the one writer I most wish I could write like. I love her precision, efficiency, terse lyricism, and mercurial shifts in tone. I love her sense of humor.
For my fannish writing I've often hearkened back to the two issues of Convention Girl's Digest, written by Sharee, Lucy Huntzinger, and Allyn Cadogan in the mid-'80s. Again, I loved the humor, the dreaminess, the chatty-friendly tone. carl and Denys were both big influences on my fannish writing style as well -- and thus on the writing in this LJ.
So if this meme could come back with "I Write Like a Poor Translation of Heinrich Böll" or "I Write Like Lucy Huntzinger" or "I Stole This Paragraph from Joan Didion", it might actually be saying something interesting.
Around that same era I was an avid reader of the SF and criticism of Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and Thomas Disch, with John Crowley discovered a couple of years later and quickly rising to the same level in my estimation. In another writing class -- a one-on-one class with Linda Robertson -- she had me take a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and replace each noun with a different noun, each verb with a different verb, each adjective with etc, using the resulting paragraph in a piece of my own on a different topic. That was so much fun that I promptly did the same with a Joanna Russ paragraph (from And Chaos Died) for a story I wrote for another Don Taylor class. Russ may well be the one writer I most wish I could write like. I love her precision, efficiency, terse lyricism, and mercurial shifts in tone. I love her sense of humor.
For my fannish writing I've often hearkened back to the two issues of Convention Girl's Digest, written by Sharee, Lucy Huntzinger, and Allyn Cadogan in the mid-'80s. Again, I loved the humor, the dreaminess, the chatty-friendly tone. carl and Denys were both big influences on my fannish writing style as well -- and thus on the writing in this LJ.
So if this meme could come back with "I Write Like a Poor Translation of Heinrich Böll" or "I Write Like Lucy Huntzinger" or "I Stole This Paragraph from Joan Didion", it might actually be saying something interesting.