Authors/ Books that influenced my Development.

So many authors and books have influenced me and how I write that this could really be multiple blog posts. As such this will just be a brief overview of different eras of my reading and how they affected me and still affect me to this day.

Early Years

I have to go to the start of my love of reading in the very first place… Roald Dahl and the various writers on the Three Investigators Series were basically my “gate-way” drug to reading. I then read through Dune and Lord of the Rings before I was 11 and the very first trio of books that got my attention was from a duo of writers Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis and the first Dragonlance Trilogy. I got those books just months after I started running games.

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Teens

The rest of my teens were devoted to David Eddings, Raymond E Feist, King, Koontz, Dennis L. McKeirnan, and Brian Lumley. Lumley would have a huge impact on me and would steer me into discovering Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. I became hooked on the old pulps, reading Lin Carter, Derleth, Howard, and Lieber. I also started getting into Cop books and contemporary thrillers.

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Twenties

My progress through my 20’s was will Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, and I started getting into Urban Fantasy and Steampunk, with Jim Butcher and Cherie Priest, respectively. I would end my 20’s coming back into Epic Fantasy with Steven Erikson, Glen Cook, and Sanderson. While it would take me over a decade to read through the whole 10 volume Erikson Series.

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The Now

I came into my 30’s with horror as my main focus. This is also when I finally started meeting some of my favorite authors and that does have a bit of an influence. It is also when I first started to think of Horror as more of an ingredient that can be added to a story and less of a genre on its own. Horror is atmosphere, psychology, consequences, and sometimes the bad people win.

This would make a huge change in what and how I wrote from this point forward, which really this is my rebirth period as a writer. So, the last decade I have been heavily influenced and inspired by people like Brian Keene, James Moore, Chris Golden, Dan Abnett, Joe Lansdale, David Niall Wilson, and by the friends I have who are just starting out, who I workshop with and help out.

And Bringing it all Together

Each decade has had one or two standout writers who really impacted me and steered me in a new direction. It’s hard not to be influenced when reading something, and it happens in other artistic mediums as well. Painters and sketchers often mimic other peoples’ styles to learn and grow.

It is part of the process of finding your own style, your own voice, is that you have to mimic or at the least try things in various ways to see what you like or dislike and then meld it into your own toolbox. Pretty much every writing book, or advice quote, I’ve seen has said that a writer MUST read. And not just read within their own genre but read in other genres as well. See how books, stories, are structured and experiment with those structures. Definitely learn tropes outside of your own genre… and definitely be willing to change, twist, or throw a trope out a window. (Just realize you can’t do this to ALL of them.)