This week's question is "If you could choose different aspects of famous writers, who would you use to construct your ideal writer?" and trying to patch together my own "Franken-author," as Meredith termed it on Monday, has sent me in a number of different directions—including one less focused on craft than on production and profitability: Erle Stanley Gardner's writing speed (a book a week!), Stephen King's bank account, Tana French's overnight success, etc.
I think most of us, when we first try to write, start out from a point not just of inspiration but of imitation. Most of us (not all) are avid readers first; we recognize how we've been impacted by a book and an author, and so maybe we set out to build something similar ourselves, make that same impact on someone else. And the first step is that is a kind of mimicry of what we've read. I remember as a teenager being blown away by Ken Follett's The Eye of the Needle and Triple and The Key to Rebecca—and then setting out to write a spy novel myself, echoing the mood and the moves and the dialogue and.... well, echoing is about all I could do, since what did I really know about espionage or history or much of anything at that point?
It's worth remembering here, of course, that Harry Crews claimed he learned to write by dissecting Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, purportedly even ripping out pages and arranging them on the floor to see them better. As he said:
I've read Graham Greene very closely with the conscious idea of seeing how in the hell he did things.... So I took one of his novels and reduced it to numbers: how many characters; how many days did the novel take; how many cities were involved; how far into the novel did I understand the climax to take place; where did the action turn; how many men, women, children, room. Then I sat down and tried to write a novel using that skeleton.... Needless to say, the novel that resulted from this was an abominable piece of work—arbitrary, mechanical, uninteresting. At the same time, I think I learned a great deal from that exercise....Unlike Crews, I don't think I'll ever be able to point to one book or even one author which taught me style and structure and character and plotting, and I don't think I could even parse out which groups of authors influenced the writer I am—anymore, of course, than I might be able to put together a conglomeration of authors that I'd like to be. Too many influences and possibilities to count, too much out there to draw from, and still so very very much to learn.