Not long ago I read a blogpost by Barbara O’Neal at Writer Unboxed about the lineage of a writer. It’s a great post that I invite you to click over to read, but I do hope you’ll come back.
That post resonated with me as an editor and writing coach, as well as an author. The blogpost is chock full of important points about how we absorb so much from reading, and the value of reading in a lot of genres and mediums. A wide-range of reading can be so beneficial in helping us grow as writers and improve our craft.
Even though we might not be aware at the time, authors can always be influenced by the books they’ve read, whether they are aware of the influence or not. As Barbara points out, “This is essentially the process our brains use to learn something, too. As human readers, we absorb the thousands of books most of us have read by the time we begin writing, with enormous emphasis on the writers we adore.”
As for my writer’s lineage, the primary influencers when I was in high school and college were Steinbeck, Austin, Hemmingway, Bronte, and Faulkner. While reading their novels I marveled at their abilities to create living characters, set vivid scenes, and write wonderful dialogue. While genres differed, the quality of writing was high in them all.
While I wasn’t aware, back in school, that those authors were influencing me as a writer, that realization came later as I worked to craft characters as memorable as George in Of Mice and Men and Jane in Jane Eyre; and the depth of emotion in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Talk about reader engagement. Who could forget the reactions of the main characters in Faulkner’s story as they took note of Cash building the coffin for Addie? Written in short, concise narrative for the most part, the emotions are vividly running through the start of the story.
In my earliest childhood, when I was obsessed with horses and dogs and western stories, the authors I read were Terhune, Farley, Zane Grey, McCormack, McMurtry, and many others too numerous to list.
I’m not sure what direct influence those authors had on my writing, but the stories sure stirred my soul. In fact, just now when checking something about the novel The Black Stallion, a link to the clip of the stunning race that occurs at the end of the movie popped up. I stopped writing the blog post and took a few minutes to watch the clip, and experienced the same thrill I had the first time I saw it, feeling my heart and soul soar.
If our souls aren’t ignited, how can we write?
Fiction is as much about the heart as the head.
In high school, when my stories were more about people, and not animals, my main influencers were Oates, Poe, O’Connor, Chekov, and Twain. From them I learned the varying techniques for writing an entire story in a few thousand words and how to make it as satisfying for a reader as a novel.
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When I was heavy into screenwriting, the advice from instructors was to watch as many movies as possible in a wide variety of categories. Paying attention to how a movie played out taught me a lot about how a story is told in visuals, as well as the nuances of excellent dialogue.
Joe Camp of “Benji” fame offered a six-week workshop on scriptwriting, and I was thrilled to be one of the authors selected to attend. In the first class, he told participants to watch the “Benji” movie and note how many lines of dialogue are in it.
Not a lot by the way.
We all took home a tape of the movie, as well as a list of questions to answer and discuss in the next session. How was the progression of the story presented? Did we connect to Benji as a character? If so, why? And if not, why? Did the absence of dialogue make the story hard to follow?
In another session we were given an assignment to write the first ten pages of a screenplay with little or no dialogue. That was a challenge at first, but the more I visualized how the characters could express themselves by use of facial expressions, gestures, pointed silences, the easier it became to write.
That exercise was written in a notebook that has been lost in the many moves since I took that workshop, but it sure would be fun to find those pages to see how I handled the assignment.
Another important lesson to come from another writing workshop at a conference was the importance of not cluttering dialogue with unnecessary wordage, something I’ve come to call “little dialogue exchanges.” The greetings, the polite dinner table manners, the verbal yesses and no’s.
A picture really can be better than a thousand words.
Joe Camp wasn’t the only filmmaker to influence my writing. When working with Stephen Marro in New York to write a screenplay together, he made me watch “The Terminator” as part of some of his tips on screenwriting.
Any of you who are familiar with the movie know how it opens. That dramatic moment when the Terminator character drops out of the sky and lands on a busy street. No explanation. No backstory on who he is. No explanation as to why he’s there.
I remember asking Stephen lots of questions, and he just said, “Wait. Wait and watch.”
Finally, the ‘aha’ moment came when it all started to make sense, and I was hooked on the story, despite my initial reluctance to watch the movie.
It was a significant breakthrough in my writing, too.
Sometimes a story works best when the action just starts. Drizzle the information in thin lines throughout, just enough to satisfy, but not too much at one time. Sort of like a thin drizzle of frosting on a cinnamon bun.
When I give writing workshops, I often tell attendees not to stop the momentum of a story to give a lot of plot or character information, or drop paragraphs of description. Give the reader some cake to eat in between the reveals.
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My go-to answer when asked what advice I’d give to a beginning writer is this: Read, read, read, then write, write, write, and read some more; doing the latter with a critical eye for what works in a particular story and what might not.
Rarely do I hear an author say that they’re not also a reader, but when I do, it makes me wonder how they ever write a novel. I truly don’t think I could have ever written even my first short story had I not been immersed in fiction from the time I learned to read. And when I moved from journalism to fiction writing, I was so thankful for all those writers who taught me so much without me even being aware until much later.
If you’re a writer, what do you think? Could you still write if you didn’t read? Who are the authors who most influenced your work?