If you ask me, any writer worth his or her or their salt as a creator is only as good as the blending of influences that served as the ingredients in the mixing bowl. Take a pinch of each of these key parts and pieces, mix on high, and you will see how I ended up the writer I am.
So, here they are, the twenty most influential writers who made me who I am and the books they wrote the had the biggest impact on me.
#20 Christa Faust -- She's the quintessential "Veronica in a world of Betties" and she has a crisp and clear but also violent and kinda dirty style that I love. She's the encourage to cut loose a bit and let my characters have fun in their less than perfect world where the clay in "feet of clay" can more often be just mud to track in all over the carpet.
#19 Lawrence Block -- I discovered Lawrence through my fascination with Hard Case Crime, and Borderline his me hard. His writing is almost as direct at Carver and Hemingway but with a more direct and to the point narrative that doesn't hide anything.
#18 Stephen King -- I wasn't always a Stephen King fan, and I'm still not a big fan of his novels. But I'll tell you this -- you'll have to look hard to find a better living short story writer than the illustrious Mr. King. In all the ways his novels disappoint me with their often forced endings, his short stories absolutely overwhelm me with their succinctness and tightly paced action and horror.
#17 Donald Westlake -- If Raymond Carver wrote thrillers, he'd be Donald Westlake, but then... we'd have two of them, and that'd be okay too. He's the best modern noir-ish writer post-Hammett and Chandler, if you ask me.
#16 Robert Heinlein -- Heinlein blending a lot of social commentary in his sci-fi but not at the risk of becoming "literature" or "high-brow" (unlike much of Vonnegut's work, at least if you listen to critics). As such, RH was able to related more to the average sci-fi reader with his tales of science and culture gone mad.
#15 Annie Dillard -- Perhaps the best modern essayist ever, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was required reading in college and I was hooked. From there, I discovered Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, and the rest of her amazing catalog filled with looking to the natural world to understand the longings of the human heart.
#14 John Fischer -- I discovered John Fischer from his column on the back page of CCM Magazine. He had a way of helping me out of the subculture of religion into the actual world of human beings and learning to be a person of faith rather than a person of irritation.
#13 Langston Hughes -- Not only an amazing poet, Hughes knew his way around a short story too, and The Ways of White Folks is one of the best short story collections in the canon of American Literature. Reading this one when I did made me face a mirror of baggage I grew up with and helped start me on the path to change.
#12 Walter Mosley -- Easy Rawlins is the best modern detective series still being published. Mosley's voice and style blows away the bestseller, summer reading thrillers by light years.
#11 Dashiell Hammett -- The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man. The Continental Op. Along with Chandler, Hammett invented the language of the modern detective story in the same way Will Eisner invented the language of the modern comic book story.
#10. C.S. Lewis -- Even though it was his Narnia books that I discovered first, it was his other fiction and his raw honesty that made him a favorite, particularly his essays on fantastic worlds, his real-time accessment of grief, and his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth.
#9 Shusaku Endo -- Endo is a writer most of you probably haven't heard of. If you haven't read any of his work, start with The Final Martyrs. It's a brilliant short novel about how even chance encounters can affect peoples lives for the long run.
#8 Zora Neale Hurston -- Her characters are some of the deepest and richest I've read. Her style feels more like listening to someone tell a story rather than reading it. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD should be required reading for anyone.
#7 Edgar Rice Burroughs -- ERB is still the best at Interplanetary Fantasy. A Princess of Mars alone would earn him a top spot, but then you throw in the Pellicudar books and the jungle fantasy of Tarzan, and ERB has legacy of adventure not even closely rivaled by anyone except MAYBE Haggard or Farmer.
#5 Kurt Vonnegut -- satirist, social prophet, sci-fi absurdist, and one of the few literary voices to truly pave his own style in recent history. His "Harrison Bergeron" found me at a young age and I was hooked.
#4 Raymond Chandler -- Chandler is as much a master of literary style as he is a master of mystery and detective fiction. His heroes all have feet of clay, and he used stereotypes with exemplary skill to build characters whose truth lay beneath those surface types. He is often imitated, but none have yet to duplicate him.
#3 Ray Bradbury -- R is for Ray. B is for Bradbury. Other writers may have been the brains and science of sci-fi, but Ray has been and will always be the character-driven heart of the genre.
#2 Flannery O'Connor -- I discovered O'Connor thanks to Steve Taylor's song "It's Harder To Believe Than Not To." Then we studied "A Good Man..." and "Everything That Rises..." in my lit class at KSC, and I was hooked. A writer of faith who didn't sugarcoat people or their reactions. A writer who understood the horror behind Southern Gothic veneers. There is something raw and painful and honest in her characters and plots that no other author I've read can match.
#1 Ernest Hemingway -- If you don't understand his influence on modern prose style and the de-fancying of American fiction, then sadly, I can't help you. I know of lots of folks who appreciate his influence but don't enjoy his actual writing, and I find that sad. He's the most direct and to the point linguist I know of who isn't as direct and to the point in his narratives. And that's a near perfect style in my book.
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