What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)

No. This isn't a post about me whipping out a Ouija board and contacting the dead, no matter how much I love ghost and horror stories. 

It's just that the bulk of my favorite writers tend to be of the "late" variety. I'm one of the oddball readers who doesn't just call a writer a favorite only because I like their work, but instead they become a favorite more because I learn something from them. I become a better writer because I read them. They influence, nay, infect me with their work. 

That said, I'm really working hard at discovering more living writers who have something to say to me about the craft -- something that isn't just a rehash of the lessons from the already dead folks. (Sure, call me a snob. I've earned it.)

Ernest Hemingway

Papa re-taught me how to write. I totally ignored Hemingway in high school when we read "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," but when I discovered him again in college and tackled books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I actually paid attention. 

What I had thought was boring in high school, I later appreciated as direct, succinct, non-flowery. And I loved it. Then, when I took a class on short stories and revisited the Nick Adams stories (and Hills Like White Elephants), I realized I was seated at the foot of a master craftsman in the art of dialogue. He was the first writer I found who let people talk around the things they wanted to say instead of talk about them. 

And that is a lightbulb moment that has followed me in my writing ever since.

Zora Neale Hurston

Woman have the most important keys of all, according to Zora Neal Hurston, in her collected folk tales Men and Mules. Those are the keys to everything that drives a man to want for himself, the kitchen and the bedroom, food and sex, his belly and his, well, you know. 

Hurston never shied away from the truth of her world. Women didn't have the power they deserved. They were treated like second-class citizens, and if one was a black woman, it was closer to third-class, right behind black men. Still, she knew the power and pride and ability she owned as an African-American woman, and those things permeated her works. Their Eyes Were Watching God, even if divorced from her full body of work, shows the life of a woman who was willing to every tool at her disposal to live life on her own terms and to achieve personal freedom, even if she had to move from man to man to man to no man in order to do it. 

In short, Zora taught me about how who I am and where I am as a writer influence me. Those things make me the way I am. They contribute to my beliefs and my character and my ideals. And there's no reason to shy away from them just because I'm telling a story. Let them flow. Chase the things I believe in and trust the story to find others who believe in them too. 

Ray Bradbury

I can write whatever the hell I want. That's the lesson I learned from Ray Bradbury. 

Do I want to write a collection of science fiction stories? Then do it. Do I want to write a mosaic novel about growing up in a small town? Then do it. Or maybe a sci-fi pseudo-novel told in short stories? Go ahead. Time's a wastin'. How 'bout a horror novel? Sure. Go right ahead. 

Don't let the machine pigeonhole you. Pay no attention to the genre markers that tell you "Thou shalt not pass." The whole of the world of storytelling is your plaything. 

There are no areas of the map you can't travel to. And there's nothing the machine or the marketing department can do to stop you.