Not too long ago, I spent a week near where my parents live. As part of that, I got access to a bunch of books that I used to read growing up. It was a fascinating experience because as soon as I saw them, these happy feelings just burst up inside of me. It got me thinking about books that really impacted not just my life, but the way I tell my own stories.
So, I thought it would be fun to go through and talk about some of my biggest influences in the various parts of storytelling. The first and probably most important is the late Terry Pratchett. I remember distinctly getting my first Terry Pratchett book. It was Wyrd Sisters and it changed my life. It completely upended the way I understood fantasy.
Up until that point, I had read Tolkien, George Macdonald, C.S. Lewis, and even a little bit of R.A. Salvatore and some Piers Anthony. But until I read Terry Pratchett, I didn’t understand how fantastical fantasy could truly be. All of those other authors have a more serious bent to them. That isn’t to say they’re without humor, but they’re not absurdist, whereas Terry Pratchett is an absurdist fantasy writer who wrote a lot of satire as well.
The thing about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld that just completely captured me was that he managed to create this world that was equal parts absurd and completely realistic. Up until that point, I didn’t understand how it was possible to take something that was so completely fantastical and ground it in reality through the characters and the nuance of familiar action and familiar relationship.
It’s no overstatement to say that Terry Pratchett really, more than any other writer, shaped the way I understand fantasy to work. I have benefited tremendously. I have been able to introduce sort of bizarre and silly concepts into my writing without compromising the integrity of the story.
Now, I do think it’s worth mentioning that my books are not nearly as funny as Terry Pratchett’s. I am not an absurdist. I don’t write that kind of fiction. But what I have been able to do is weave the sort of light-hearted humor that Terry Pratchett really mastered through my books. I’m looking forward to increasing my own mastery of that particular style of writing.
Again, I don’t intend to write absurdist fiction. As Terry Pratchett got older, his books became less absurd as well and he started drifting more into satire specifically. I think I would like to write satire at some point. I’m not there yet. I’m not a good enough writer, I think, to do that. But I have benefited just so tremendously from understanding how he weaves in surprise and sort of unexpected situations. His books were such a joy for me as a young reader.
He’s not the only one. When I was up at my parents’ house, I also saw their collection of Louis L’Amour. Louis L’Amour was a western pulp writer. He introduced a theme into my life as a kid that still to this day carries on through both my characters and my descriptions. That is, he had a real eye for the awesome power of nature.
If you haven’t read Louis L’Amour, you might get a similar feeling from reading Jack London’s White Fang, those style of adventure books where man versus element becomes a major touchstone for the story. I’ve only recently started exploring that theme directly, but I think that awe of nature, that sense of adventure and excitement to see what’s over the next mountain, to see what’s over the next hill, has infused all of my writing. All of my characters have a deep need to explore, and I think it comes directly from reading Louis L’Amour as a kid.
He also had a tremendous way of introducing hard, gritty characters who still have emotion, still have relationships, still love other people. That’s something that I really enjoy writing as well. People who, despite the odds, have the fortitude to soldier on. That’s an ideal that I’ve always aspired to in my own characters.
Along with that, though, in a very different vein, was Georgette Heyer. My parents collect Georgette Heyers as well. Georgette Heyer was an author who wrote mysteries, historical, and she’s most well known for her regency romances. Growing up, I read all of them. Every single one. I love regency romance as a category, specifically because of Georgette Heyer.
But the thing about her writing that just really gripped me was the way her characters interacted. They had emotions that made them feel real. They had conversations that sounded like not a conversation you were reading, but a conversation that you were listening in on. She was masterful in her dialogue. She was masterful in the way that she paced the relationships, allowing the characters to be human, to get annoyed with each other, to be frustrated with each other, to be delighted by one another, to be intrigued.
She never blatantly came out and stated the feelings, but they’re woven in through her dialogue, through the actions that the characters take. That weaving of the emotional plot opened my eyes to what is possible in a story. This is one of the areas that I’m still continuing to work on in my own stories, but I can trace a lot of my style of storytelling, especially when it comes to characters and dialogue, back to the way that she wrote hers.
And then last but not least, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a special shout out to R.A. Salvatore. R.A. Salvatore and actually Piers Anthony as well, two writers who wrote fantasy. R.A. Salvatore in the Forgotten Realms books and Piers Anthony in sort of portal fantasy. Both of them had tremendous pacing. Pacing that just pulled you along through the story in one giant rush. I enjoyed that so much as a kid.
As I have started writing, that is sort of what I have tried to emulate. This sort of adventurous rush that pulls you through the story from beginning to end without letting you stop. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments to breathe. Their pacing was never so frantic that it felt untenable. Instead, both writers just did a fantastic job keeping the reader on the edge of their seat, and I love that.
So, those are some authors that really impacted the way that I write, the way that I tell stories. I’d be interested to know for you though, are there particular authors who you read as a younger person that are now shaping the way you write?
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/KnoDsop82rY
Thanks for reading and watching.
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