My early influences
Sep. 18th, 2007 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonAs inspired by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
barbarienne here's a "meme" of my top ten SFF influences. As she said, all these writers were important to me before my early twenties, really helped form who I am. I've continued to learn from writers ever since, but these are the seminal influences.
1. Madeleine L'Engle - Some of her images and the feelings they evoke have stayed with me through a lifetime.
2. Lewis Carroll - His sense of wordplay and surrealism are permanently lodged in my brain.
3. Andre Norton - She encouraged a sense of wonder and big themes and imaginative worlds that first made me long to be a writer.
4. Rosemary Sutcliff - Not an sff writer, but she wrote about Dark Age Britain, a time that very little was known about, and made rich, complex, alien (yet still familiar) worlds for me to inhabit. These worlds still live in the dark forests of my heart.
5. Mary Stewart - Her Arthurian tales were early favorites. I adored them and have been an Arthurian nut ever since.
6. Robert Heinlein - Love him or hate him now, I ate up huge chunks of his work at a young and impressionable age. He gave me a love of big themes and grand scope.
7. Peter S. Beagle - Ah, Master Beagle. So much magic and sad beauty, enchantment and human joy, and you made me know it was all right to write about the liminal spaces that exist in the here and now. Above all, you made me see that character and what stories do to people are the most important parts of stories.
8. John Fowles - Mostly thought of as a literary writer, he occasionally lapsed into speculative fiction. I'm thinking of The Magus and A Maggot, works where it was difficult to see the line between consensus reality and the world of the imagination. Seminal works for my late teens.
9. Carlos Casteneda - Dude said he was writing non-fiction, but nuh-uh. He did inspire an intense love of mystery beneath the surface of things (or perhaps reinforced what was already there). Again, I think this is part of where my love of contemporary fantasy comes from.
10. Anne Rice - Again, I have to forget about the self-parody she's become and remember the early impact those first vampire books had on me. Suddenly, the dark side and lush language was sexy. Who knew? Ironically, she was not what inspired me to write about vampires. I have to blame Forever Knight for that abomination.
barbarienne here's a "meme" of my top ten SFF influences. As she said, all these writers were important to me before my early twenties, really helped form who I am. I've continued to learn from writers ever since, but these are the seminal influences.1. Madeleine L'Engle - Some of her images and the feelings they evoke have stayed with me through a lifetime.
2. Lewis Carroll - His sense of wordplay and surrealism are permanently lodged in my brain.
3. Andre Norton - She encouraged a sense of wonder and big themes and imaginative worlds that first made me long to be a writer.
4. Rosemary Sutcliff - Not an sff writer, but she wrote about Dark Age Britain, a time that very little was known about, and made rich, complex, alien (yet still familiar) worlds for me to inhabit. These worlds still live in the dark forests of my heart.
5. Mary Stewart - Her Arthurian tales were early favorites. I adored them and have been an Arthurian nut ever since.
6. Robert Heinlein - Love him or hate him now, I ate up huge chunks of his work at a young and impressionable age. He gave me a love of big themes and grand scope.
7. Peter S. Beagle - Ah, Master Beagle. So much magic and sad beauty, enchantment and human joy, and you made me know it was all right to write about the liminal spaces that exist in the here and now. Above all, you made me see that character and what stories do to people are the most important parts of stories.
8. John Fowles - Mostly thought of as a literary writer, he occasionally lapsed into speculative fiction. I'm thinking of The Magus and A Maggot, works where it was difficult to see the line between consensus reality and the world of the imagination. Seminal works for my late teens.
9. Carlos Casteneda - Dude said he was writing non-fiction, but nuh-uh. He did inspire an intense love of mystery beneath the surface of things (or perhaps reinforced what was already there). Again, I think this is part of where my love of contemporary fantasy comes from.
10. Anne Rice - Again, I have to forget about the self-parody she's become and remember the early impact those first vampire books had on me. Suddenly, the dark side and lush language was sexy. Who knew? Ironically, she was not what inspired me to write about vampires. I have to blame Forever Knight for that abomination.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 12:53 am (UTC)I liked Andre Norton and Mary Stewart - I don't know how old I was when I read L'engle and I know I was older when Beagle showed up in my reading list.
I know I read ordinary books from school book fairs, but as far as what I remember reading, I found things my mom had on her shelves, like A. Merritt and H Rider Haggard---not sure, but I think they call some of that prose purple these days! lol
no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 05:52 pm (UTC)They call it purple, but it sure was fun to read back in the day.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 05:52 pm (UTC)