What author has most influenced your writing?

[Voboy]

Tolkien, Herbert, Niven, Rice

I forgot Herbert. Dammit.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Douglas Adams, Terry & Rihanna Pratchett, George Lucas, Tim Zahn, RA Salvatore, Larry Correira, Eric Lustbader, Stephen King, Jonathan Maberry, Jim Butcher, David & Leigh Eddings, Rick Riordan, Stan Lee, Bob Kane, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Garth Ennis, Greg Weisman, Marti Noxon, JJ Abrams, Drew Hayes, Harlan Coben, CJ Box, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, and Laurell K Hamilton have been among my favorite mainstream professional writers. As for online erotic authors, BlueDragon has a large portion of my lasting respect. Also Carnage Jackson, aimingtomisbehave, EmilyMiller, and Freya Gersemi. And Christine Morgan and Christi Smith Hayden in the late 90s when I first seriously started writing online. But there is no one writer to whom I would give primary credit. My own imagination always takes the top spot phasing outside influences into my work.

Hey! Thanks

 

[MillieDynamite]

Hope and faith aren't the same. Hope is all almost undefinable. Though technically, it is = To wish for something with the expectation of its fulfillment. OR To have confidence; trust.

While faith is = Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. OR Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. And, It is the ability to believe something without proof.

Such a strange question to be asked in this thread
I'll bite though. Reincarnation? Not really, no. The trouble doesn't lie there, though. I mostly have a problem with the word "believe" and thus every religion sounds equally ridiculous to me. The best way I can put it is that... I hope there is something more than this, and if there is, I am quite certain no one has a clue what that something really is. So I can say that I "hope" but I don't "believe" in any specific religion nor in the idea that any person or any religious book in this world has answers to those questions. I am mostly an agnostic/skeptic.

I loved Elementary, but yes, the writing beats all the adaptions out there. Check out Nicholas Myers's books about Sherlock. There are five wonderful novels.

I’m a big Sherlock reader - the books are so much better than an adaptation

Emily

 

[EmilyMiller]

Check out Nicholas Myers's books about Sherlock. There are five wonderful novels.

Will do - thanks

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Hope and faith aren't the same. Hope is all almost undefinable. Though technically, it is = To wish for something with the expectation of its fulfillment. OR To have confidence; trust.

While faith is = Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. OR Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. And, It is the ability to believe something without proof.

I wasn't comparing them or using them in the same context.

The best way I can put it is that... I hope there is something more than this, and if there is, I am quite certain no one has a clue what that something really is. So I can say that I "hope" but I don't "believe" in any specific religion nor in the idea that any person or any religious book in this world has answers to those questions. I am mostly an agnostic/skeptic.

I was describing my own relationship with the big question here.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Sherlock Holmes Pastiche by Nicholas Meyer Series

Will do - thanks

 

[AG31]

Pauline Reage

 

[Wonderer67]

For my stories, Alan Furst.

I write mostly poetry, I’d have to say Courtney Barnett.

 

[karina_jayde]

For erotica specifically, probably Jacqueline Carey (in terms of weaving erotica and romance in with sweeping fantasy adventures). There are also two writers who submitted on Literotica who were a big influence, in terms of weaving erotica and fantasy adventures together: Etaski, and Sarah Hawke. Etaski's Red Sister series (since unpublished here but now on Amazon) in particular inspired me to give erotica a try.

 

[countdowntolov3]

Jim Butcher.

Not because he's my favorite author, but because I think he's an example of how far you can go by mastering a few key tools. I'm convinced he "made it" simply because his in-scene pacing, building tension and then releasing it, is just like down to a science. It's perfect. Addictive. I'd believe it was focus group tested. He's so fucking good at it. But boy does he lean on that one trick hard.

 

[AchtungNight]

Chuck Norris can list more authors than @AchtungNight

In my ficverse, Chuck Norris is among the martial arts teachers my alter-ego respects as a sparring partner and positive influence. He's on that list in real life too, though I have never met the guy.

Anyone can list more authors than me if they put their minds to it.

 

[Paul_Chance]

Harlan Ellison and Robert Heinlein. Though, in all fairness, I've never written a lick of science fiction here. Just a pair of hugely influential writers that shaped my love of short stories.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Ellison would have sued you if your writing vaguely resembled his! Or that you credited him with inspiring a story. Ask James Cameron; he stated Terminator was heavily inspired by one of Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits or Twilight Zones scripts, and you guessed it, Harlan Ellison sued Cameron's ass off. In fact, he was quite litigious. Many of the lawsuits were meritless but the defendants paid him nausence value to end the litigation.

Harlan Ellison and Robert Heinlein. Though, in all fairness, I've never written a lick of science fiction here. Just a pair of hugely influential writers that shaped my love of short stories.

 

[AchtungNight]

Heinlein has influenced me too.

 

[RelentlessOnanism]

Stephen King. Even though I don't write horror.

 

[StillStunned]

Two authors who I read voraciously as a kid were Lloyd Alexander and Terry Brooks. They both have an uncanny ability to create images with few words, leaving the reader to fill in the details in their own mind. They provide a black-and-white sketch, as it were, and the reader adds the colours.

 

[KeithD]

Hey! Me too. Well not in my writing (as if), but two of my favorite authors. Could argue that Cornwell took on Greene’s mantle.

Emily

Pat Cornwell? If so, *shudder*, no. Her protagonist was/is so morose, I couldn't read more than a couple of her books. Plus, we ran her out of town here because she seduced the governor's wife just to get private tidbits to use in her books.

 

[ElectricBlue]

John le Carré and John Banville, the first for compelling set pieces, the second for stunning sentences. Not so much influences for erotica though.

For fantasy worlds, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy. When I was sixteen I fell in love with his Fuschia in her red dress. She was sixteen, too.

 

[ronde]

I have a long list and many on that list are writers who wrote for the "men's adventure magazines" in the 1950's. Among them are Arthur Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Earl Stanley Gardner, and Ray Bradbury. Novelists include Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Dumas, and Ian Fleming as well as others who aren't as well known like William Sarabande, W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear, Richard Henry Dana, and James H. Foster.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Probably Stephen King. But just as we learn what to do and what not to do from our parents examples, SK has influenced me similarly.

He feeds us the nuances of his characters over the course of the story. I love that and try to do similarly. On the other hand his characters internal monologues get tiresome. His need to describe minutiae as well though he's gotten better with that.

But it's his relatable characters and natural dialogue that I try the hardest to emulate.

I'm listening to Faerie Tale now.

Edit- I'm gonna add R.A. Salvatore. He does high adventure better that most and I'm drawn to that. I'm just cutting my teeth on my first adventure stories now.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

None. Zero. Of all the famous authors brought up here often, I haven't read any of them, other than one John Grisham book, three R. L. Stien Goosebumps, Nora Roberts In Death books, six of the Harry Potter books, one or two Wayside School books by Louis Sacher. Excluding who may be famous or noteworthy that had to be read for school.

 

[Devinter]

I'd have to say Robert Jordan, Anne Rice, Frank Herbert, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and Albert Pike - though how much of this actually makes it into my erotic stories, where I try to focus less on world-building and more on character relations (and what they do with their genitalia), I am not sure. And I think the erotic stories where they might have had the strongest influence never got finished or published.

 

[CockSparrow]

Graham Greene, John LeCarre, James Joyce, J P Donleavy, E L Doctorow, Elmore Leonard, Peter Carey, and a few others

 

[onehitwanda]

Arthur C Clarke and Roger Zelazny, I think.

 

[STrent]

Seamus Heaney. Death of a Naturalist is a really powerful collection of poems.

In terms of novels, I’ve always admired Tolkien’s epic world building, and Terry Pratchett’s dedication to research and humour in his.

Heaney I think comes through a tad in my work with the contractions I put in, I could never claim to be channeling Pratchett or Tolkien!