… Stephen King when I write drama*, like David Foster Wallace and Arthur Clarke* when I write romance***, and like Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Dickens when I write blog posts.
I know, right?! Pretty heady comparisons!
And, no, I did not make this up.
And also no, I don’t try to write like anyone other than myself, although there’s always seepage, they say.
In fact, I couldn’t have been influenced directly by three of these authors – Clarke, Foster Wallace, and Palahniuk – as I’ve never read any of their works. [Confession: I’m now sorely tempted to correct those reading oversights. Because if they write like me (ahem), I’ll probably really like them!]
I have read King and Dickens extensively.
King was one of my earliest favorite authors, as I started reading his stuff when I was a teenager (yes, a million years ago) and consider him an amazing writer. There’s not much of his oeuvre that I haven’t read (except the Gunslinger series, which started coming out when I wasn’t very patient with serial fiction), and I consider The Stand to be a masterpiece.
I didn’t get into Dickens until I was an adult, but have read and loved his works.
The Meyers thing? I don’t know where that came from. Nope, no Twilight for me. My sole foray in Meyerdom was The Host… which was pretty darned good, but hardly powerful enough writing to have been an influence.
So, if I didn’t make these comparisons up, where do they come from? From here. I read about I Write Like in a blog post by Wil Wheaton, in which he discovered he writes like Cory Doctorow, too. (I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the coincidence makes my inner Wheaton-fangirl squee a little… and I wouldn’t lie to you… Really. Promise. Ahem.)
Who do you write like? Go find out, then leave me a note in the comments to tell me, ‘kay?
* Where drama = my short story “Magic Hands”
** Also like Stephenie Meyer and Cory Doctorow, depending on what bit of text I had analyzed.
*** Where romance = my novel-in-the-works