All Writers Steal. Whose Stuff Did You Take As Your Own?

[Robert Crisman]

As writers, our true selves are synthetic products, comprised of the stirrings and thoughts that drove us to write in the first place, as well as those writers we begged, borrowed, and stole from in learning our craft and in coming to terms with ourselves. It's the same with all writers, all the way back to the first storytellers, who took their own cues from the thunder and lightning and sabertooth tigers and so forth.
I ripped off whole tons of writers, sometimes all in the same piece of work: Hammett, Engels, Ellroy, Genet; Trotsky, Vidal, David Freeman, Ross Thomas; above all, the dialogue master, the great George V. Higgins.
If you steal, and you will, steal big!
So who were the writers you took from to learn how to say the things that you need to say, in the way that you need to say them?

[Paul de Denus]

If I'm trying to write 'funny"- I look to David Sedaris's first four books (Barrel Fever/Naked/Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim/Me Talk Pretty One Day)- there are some real howler's in there and it's such family stuff which I like to observe, that I'll try and mimic it. For fiction, I really love Cormac McCarthy (The Road/Outer Dark/Blood Meridian) -how he describes scenes and landscapes- just pulls you along with few words.

[jkdavies]

At a formative age (10, 11, 12?) I first read Jane Gaskell's The Serpent. Her writing in this and the rest of the Atlan series is so vivid in description, and the descriptions so perfectly matched to the character of the narrator that I used to read it, and then start again from the first page to savour the words again. I guess this series most of all influences the way I feel "natural" writing, in that I love the perfect adjectives, and feel odd about cutting out reams of descriptions although I do like to give other moods a whirl every now and then.
And one day I'll try my hand at believable dialogue too!

[Sandra Davies]

This is a tricky one because while I recognise that I have an individual 'voice' I have no conscious knowledge of its source - read a lot of Austen, Brontës etc as a child but always as stories, and never noticing the language. I too read the Jane Gaskell books that Julia mentions and remember the upliftingness of the descriptions but not the words used, or how they were used. And as a consequence I don't steal phrases as far as I am aware ... but I certainly aim for a particular mood which derives from not especially good novels I have read and enjoyed.
That said, I am sitting up and taking more notice now - but am not very good at remembering/recalling.

[Bob Clay]

There's an old saying that 'there is nothing new under the Sun'. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say I stole something from all the writers I have read, more that I was influenced by them (as they were influenced by someone before, and someone before, and som....... well, ya get the picture).

Ideas for stories I have stole though. I heard somewhere there were only a small number of basic storylines, and we all go for our version (or versions) of these. Maybe that's true.

Writers I can think of who influenced me: well ... dozens .. Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Heller, Larry Niven, Len Deighton, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare (naturally), Charles Dickens ... to name but a few ... and for ideas ! Stephen Hawking, Asimov again, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, Tolkein ... again to name but a few. Fiction and non-fiction (which are often hard to tell apart). Then of course the unsung writers of worklogs, ship's logs and all the sundry of paper you come across in your work that often contain startling gems of both humour and despair.
As an example I once sailed with a Captain who was at sea during World War 2 and on one Atlantic crossing got torpedoed three times (his ship, and two rescue ships) and to make matters worse on the way back on another ship, he got torpedoed again. He then cracked an old Monty Python joke by saying 'Of course, I was getting used to it by then.'
Unimaginable danger and terror, brushed off with a joke. Hence my fascination with those dark times in the North Atlantic. You hear stories throughout your life, and they are bound to influence you, and find their ways into anything you may write.

[Joseph Lupoli]

Well, I stole a gun once. But that was well before I began writing on a regular basis.