Every writer has people in real life and authors they’ve never met who put them on the path to scribe-dom, whether it was an encouraging teacher or a writer who revealed what was possible with the written word.
Who influenced you along the way? Who helped make you the writer you are today?
Mike Daniels, the English Teacher who had me write my own ending to “A Farewell to Arms” and then turned around and entered my original short story (“California Sunrise”) in my High School’s short story writing contest. It won, and I became aware of how it touched people — what a thrill. Thank you Mike! …And my fab 4: Steinbeck (for a tapestry of description), Twain (for dialect), Hemingway (for storytelling) and Dickens (for his truly unique creativity of presentation.)
As strange as it may sound – television. I must have been around 10 or so when I started to take my favourite characters from tv-shows and sent them on new adventures in my head. I wrote a couple of them down just to get them out of my head again…
Then came Stargate SG1 and I discovered fanfiction a few years ago. That’s when I started to write fiction seriously. I used fanfiction to improve my skills (for whatever reason I can’t write fiction in my mother tongue…) and then stumbled over NaNoWriMo and suddenly found myself writing original fiction as well.
I might still be in the learning stages, but writing has become a very important part of my life!
Mike Slosberg. As an assistant executive at the world’s biggest, best-known Madison Avenue ad agency, using powder in my hair to look older (and now bootblack in what hair I have left to look younger!), I met Mike. He was a prominent 18 years-older VP/Creative Director who liked that I hustled, told the truth, was sincere, and motivated (with three infant mouths to feed) . . . all slim-pickin’ character traits in that business.
Mike took months of hours to teach me about high-impact words and the creative process. He gave me secret assignments as a moonlighting writer and helped me crank out award-winning advertising copy — from airline billboards, tire ads, and a still-famous hot dog jingle, to radio scripts and TV storyboards for bacon and eggs, brochures for washers and dryers, you name it!
Mike taught me the four most important words every writer needs to hear. “It’s not good enough!” I remember him saying this, then smiling over the tops of his reading glasses. His challenge always produced better work. He made me write a billboard first for every assignment (“seven words or less—with a beginning, middle, an end, and be persuasive!”) Many years later, I still start every book, article, ad, website, brochure, script, jingle, blog post, email, and personal letter, with a billboard. “Forced encapsulation” I call it.
When I moved on to another ad agency, I arranged to have a NYC parking meter delivered to Mike with a note attached: “Thanks for the time!” and told him I’d get him a floor stand for it, which I never remembered to do. Decades later, a copy of his one and only novel arrived one day in the mail inscribed “Where the hell’s my parking meter stand? All my best – Mike”
Thanks for the chance to comment, and the prompt to remember my greatest influence as a writer! And thanks, Mike Slosberg . . . wherever you are!www.halalpiar.com
Lois Lowry and Avi. Love ’em both. They were the first writers I ever became loyal to and to this day I will purchase anything with their name on it without even knowing what it is.
Two people have been my main influence as a writer. Stephen King, whose book “On Writing” helped me to realize that I don’t need to copy anyone else’s style for my work to be good. The second person is my ninth-grade Creative Writing teacher, Mr. Schlessinger, who told me I didn’t have what it takes. Since his comment, I’ve striven to not simply write more, but to write more quality into what I do. I take more pride in what I put to paper because he said that I was incapable of doing so.
Nora Roberts/JD Robb was my biggest influence in starting me on my path as a writer.
Nora Roberts,Stephen King and my husband who tole me to stop thinking about writing and write the story running around in my head.
. . . my dog, Yankee Doodle.25 docedBo
At Oglethorpe University (in the dark ages of half a century ago) my senior English professor said, "Steve, you have a very nice way with words, you just need something to write about." I took that as an encouraging comment, whether it was meant that way or not. A year later I was in a writing class at The New School (NYC) in which the teacher was so caustic that I gave up writing fiction for decades. So, they were both influential regarding my writing.
The writers who have influenced me in style, process, structure, and thought include Ron Carlson, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Philip and Henry Roth, Alice Munro, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Chandler, Vonnegut, Chabon, Doctorow, Malamud, Melville, and of course Nabakov. Not all at the same time, certainly, but all are behind me kicking my butt (an indulgent fantasy, but not a bad one).
Thanks for the great question, Nathan. And what a response!