As much as I'd love to say Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger, for me it was probably Max Shulman, author of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," "Barefoot Boy with Cheek," "Rally Round the Flag Boys," and others. Pynchon and Salinger are in there too, of course, but I think my style is still 90% Max Shulman.
The writer who made you want to be a novelist
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William Faulkner. When I read The Sound and the Fury fro the first time, I said: Please, God, let me write like this. Alas...
LM Montgomery. "The Story Girl" and "The Golden Road" are two of my favorite books. I read them over and over in my teen years, falling in love with the setting and the characters each time I revisited them. Those books made me want to be a novelist. I wanted to do what she did to me: make someone cry with one, single line of prose.*
*no, not because it's a terrible line! Sheesh...
*no, not because it's a terrible line! Sheesh...
Jack London, but as a kid Grimm's fairy tales... I still pick them up and read the bremen town musicians.
Don't remember the gal's name. But when I finished that book....I knew I could do better. Yep. Knew it for a fact.
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No one remotely literary, but YA fantasy author Tamora Pierce. Her heroines are so kick-a$$ and the stories are far from cliche. I love her.
Miss Potter
This is an embarassing admission, but... Beatrix Potter. When I was 3 or 4, Peter Rabbit was my favorite story. (A simple saga with a theme of unbridled gluttony...something I can relate to. It helped that like me, Peter had 3 idiotic younger sibs.)
I taught myself to read because I loved that book so much. Even then, I knew I wanted to be on "the other side" of the page.
I can remember quizzing my Mom on the author. "Who wrote Peter Rabbit? What was his name? How did he do it? Did he draw the pictures, too?"
I was THRILLED to learn that the author was female. (Until that point, I assumed that I'd have to be the first woman writer in human history.) My mother really didn't know much about Potter, but I was satisfied.
I found Hemingway when I was in junior high because I was checking out the school library shelf where my novel would go, if I ever published one. Over the years I've also been inspired (and sometimes driven to despair) by Pearl Buck, Agatha Christie, Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison and VS Naipaul. But Beatrix was my first love.
This is an embarassing admission, but... Beatrix Potter. When I was 3 or 4, Peter Rabbit was my favorite story. (A simple saga with a theme of unbridled gluttony...something I can relate to. It helped that like me, Peter had 3 idiotic younger sibs.)
I taught myself to read because I loved that book so much. Even then, I knew I wanted to be on "the other side" of the page.
I can remember quizzing my Mom on the author. "Who wrote Peter Rabbit? What was his name? How did he do it? Did he draw the pictures, too?"
I was THRILLED to learn that the author was female. (Until that point, I assumed that I'd have to be the first woman writer in human history.) My mother really didn't know much about Potter, but I was satisfied.
I found Hemingway when I was in junior high because I was checking out the school library shelf where my novel would go, if I ever published one. Over the years I've also been inspired (and sometimes driven to despair) by Pearl Buck, Agatha Christie, Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison and VS Naipaul. But Beatrix was my first love.
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JK Rowling. A bit cliche for a teen writer, I know, but she really did. I grew up on her books, and I'd always loved to write (although my stories when I was 6 had absolutely no plot, but the characters should had a wealth of conflict), but she was the one that really made me go "I could do this".
Especially when I heard her story of being rejected by publishers and then I saw what she became. And I read her books and they don't seem so high over my level of writing (they are, certainly, but not impossibly so) and they're in a genre I love and it just says to me that I can do it, too.
I dream big. I never let myself think I'd be a mediocre writer. When I start writing, I picture the interviews of actors who play my characters when it's made into a movie. I imagine the interviews I'll give, what people will say when they analyze my books after my death. And JK Rowling, to me, was the first example I ever related with where my dreams were actually a reality for her. She got the movies, she got the millions, everything I dreamed of getting, she had, so it made it possible for me.
Especially when I heard her story of being rejected by publishers and then I saw what she became. And I read her books and they don't seem so high over my level of writing (they are, certainly, but not impossibly so) and they're in a genre I love and it just says to me that I can do it, too.
I dream big. I never let myself think I'd be a mediocre writer. When I start writing, I picture the interviews of actors who play my characters when it's made into a movie. I imagine the interviews I'll give, what people will say when they analyze my books after my death. And JK Rowling, to me, was the first example I ever related with where my dreams were actually a reality for her. She got the movies, she got the millions, everything I dreamed of getting, she had, so it made it possible for me.
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This thread really made me think about why I do this. I am obviously odd man (?) out here!! I never read when I was growing up. My whole family devoured books, and I hated watching them all read. In school, I wrote all my exams with the help of Coles notes, but I still have a book I wrote when I was in Grade 5 -- a whole notebook, every line of every page, and it took me a full year to write, but that was what I did when I was supposed to be doing math!!! I hated reading, though. When I got the best high school english teacher in the world for Grade 10 English, I started to really love the mechanics of writing and learned more from her in one term than I did in all the other years of school combined. I think I wrote because I needed to compete with all the authors that the rest of the family talked abou, and because I wanted a story that no one would ruin the ending of for me (every time I started to read a book, my sister would tell me how it ended and I would throw the book in the corner). Now, I have a library in my house with hundreds of books in it, and I love every one of them. Go figure. Now I'm really confused about this!!!
Kurt Vonnegut.
Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury gave me some serious inspiration to write fiction. But I had the remarkable luck to be able to talk one-on-one with Vonnegut for about an hour, back in 1967, when he was working on what would become Slaughterhouse-Five, and that gave me the kick-start into the idea of writing novels.
So I did. Alas, it hasn't worked in any successful way. Perhaps that's best for the welfare of Western Civilization.
But I still revere that man.
caw
Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury gave me some serious inspiration to write fiction. But I had the remarkable luck to be able to talk one-on-one with Vonnegut for about an hour, back in 1967, when he was working on what would become Slaughterhouse-Five, and that gave me the kick-start into the idea of writing novels.
So I did. Alas, it hasn't worked in any successful way. Perhaps that's best for the welfare of Western Civilization.
But I still revere that man.
caw
Mark Twain and Douglas Adams taught me about humor, both sly and slapstick, and Ayn Rand showed me how to get totally lost in a story. I get inspired every few years by different authors; I'm wowed by Jennifer Cruisie's seemingly effortless genius for romantic comedy, and Billie Letts' talent for creating characters that sound like they stepped right out of my own hometown. But the first one who really turned on that switch was Neil Simon. As a teenager, I checked out a book of his plays, devoured it, and started a novel that thankfully has never seen the light of day since.
I can't pick just one.
Judy Blume taught me to love reading. Stephen King's books always have something in them that make me stop and realize how true said something rings. Wallace Stegner inspires me.
But I think I've always wanted to write, and can't really say where it came from. If there was one person, it would have to be a non-author, my 10th grade English teacher.
Judy Blume taught me to love reading. Stephen King's books always have something in them that make me stop and realize how true said something rings. Wallace Stegner inspires me.
But I think I've always wanted to write, and can't really say where it came from. If there was one person, it would have to be a non-author, my 10th grade English teacher.
I feel like such a dweeb. Some of you folks have read and been inspired literary greats that I've never sat down and read. Call me lazy. Someday I'll read the Great Gatzby or maybe Of Mice And Men, but for now it's genre fic all the way.
BTW - It was R.A. Salvatore that sparked it for me. I'd been playing D&D for years and never envisioned the terrain as well as he laid it out. Even cried when I though he killed one of my favorite characters.
Pike
BTW - It was R.A. Salvatore that sparked it for me. I'd been playing D&D for years and never envisioned the terrain as well as he laid it out. Even cried when I though he killed one of my favorite characters.
Pike
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I'd have to say my sixth grade English teacher...who actually is an author, though she writes non-fiction. But we had "writing workshops" in her class and that's when I wrote my first stories and started my first novel (not finished & terribly written...good story, though 
) and she kind of inspired me by telling me my strengths and weaknesses and really making me want to write long-term.
) and she kind of inspired me by telling me my strengths and weaknesses and really making me want to write long-term.
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J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern), and Alan Dean Foster (Humanx Commonwealth) were my inspirations. 
I was already writing when I came across their works, but they helped me improve tremendously.
I was already writing when I came across their works, but they helped me improve tremendously.
The writer who made me want to be a novelist was my father. He never published that I am aware of, but he had some pretty good insights into my abilities as a child. When I was 9 years old, he told me I could be a good writer if I worked at it.
However, my style comes partially, I think, from Robert Louis Stevenson. When I first read Treasure Island, the writing style hooked me like no other author's style ever has. Having very fond memories of Treasure Island, when I was fairly young, I adopted much of what I thought was his style when writing my first attempts at novels.
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