Your Lineage as a Writer
By Barbara O'Neal | April 23, 2024 |
As a painter who has been at it for almost a decade now, I realized recently that I’d stopped trying to imitate other painters. I’m influenced by many, all my great loves—O’Keeffe and Matisse, Turner and Constable; illustrators Sempe and Juarez– but somewhere along the line, I started interpreting the world of paint and shape in my own way.
And yet, those painters and illustrators remain as my teachers, my lineage of color theory and line.
Years into my publishing career, I happened to pick up Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of my favorite novels, by one of my favorite writers. I read it over and over and over when I was a teenager, finding sustenance in the way he used light and wonder and memory.
On that adult reread, I discovered it was still a fabulous novel, but I was astonished to notice how much Bradbury influenced my actual writing style. In his rhythms, I could hear something of my own, in his choice of adjectives and words, I heard a cadence I had internalized.
In the furious discussions over emerging AI models, the biggest uproar revolves around the training aspect: AI is trained to write by reading zillions of works, or to create visual images by absorbing hundreds of millions of paintings. (Please don’t take this to the AI discussion. That’s not what it’s about.)
This is essentially the process our brains use to learn something, too. As human readers, we absorb the thousands of books most of us have read by the time we begin writing, with enormous emphasis on the writers we adore. In a high school creative writing class, one of the exercises was first copying out the passage of writing we liked by hand* then follow up with a passage using that writer’s style to compose one of our own. In art classes, I’ve done the same thing—viewed dozens of a painter’s pieces, then painted my own using her style. Some fit, some don’t, just as with writing.
Imitation is one of the ways we learn as we start out. I imitated Bradbury, both consciously in my passages in creative writing class, and unconsciously because I adored the rhythms of his sentences and the feeling of light he conjured in my mind. I wanted to do that, so most earnestly, I stepped in his footsteps.
Other writers influenced me, too. Anya Seton with her sweeping historical and romantic novels, particularly Green Darkness which holds up a pillar of my writing house all by itself, in ways I can tease out and many which I could not. As with Bradbury, I read her novels as a young teen, a time my writer brain was earnestly open and hungry.
Another group of writers shaped me a little later, when I was a hungry young writer trying to figure out how to write. I read constantly, everything I could get my hands on, gulping down novels of all kinds, mostly checked out the library but also picked up at garage sales and traded with my mother and friends. The genre mattered little, but I especially loved novels with women at the center. I fell desperately in love with certain novels and certain writers. Laura Esquivel in Like Water for Chocolate —oh, those scenes in the kitchens! The desire leaking into every page! I just couldn’t get enough of it. I read it and started over again almost immediately. I didn’t know how she accomplished so much in a small book.
Another writer who obsessed me was Louise Erdrich, especially Tracks, which I loved so much I wrote her a letter, back before we shot off emails to anyone we chose, and months later, a letter from her, in her own hand, came back to me. It was one of my most treasured possessions for years. Her sense of place and the influence of the unseen, not to mention her language, knocked me out.
I was also heavily influenced by Stephen King, which my mother pre-read for me so I could skip the ones that would bother me (I see you over there, Pet Cemetery). His characters are so exquisitely drawn, so quickly, that we immediately empathize with them.
I loved a certain kind of intensely romantic ghost story, one a movie version of The Haunting of Hill House (the old black and white version, seriously one of the most terrifying movies of all time), and Bledding Sorrow, by Marilyn Harris.
When I got serious about trying to figure out how to write romance novels, I took a class and the teacher gave us a form to use to take the books apart, analyzing characters, beats, plots, everything. I kept a notebook of every romance I read for months and months, and one writer emerged as a favorite for her savvy storylines that proved to be unpredictable. She broke the rules, and got very gritty sometimes, and she wrote for the line I thought might suit me, Harlequin American, which had a more realistic bent than many series lines at the time. Rebecca Flanders wrote a dozen or so romances, then—as many romance writers of the time eventually did—went on to write many novels in other genres as Donna Ball.
The Flanders novels showed me the shape of a novel I could write in a mannered genre. Confining myself to the rules of romance taught me massive amounts about how to create good structure, how to set up and resolve conflict, how to bring in my own special trademarks, language, sense of place, characters who’d walked a hard road.
Many, many, many other writers influenced me. All of them, honestly, in one way or another, but if I look at the lineage of the books that led me to becoming the writer I am, these are the ones that stand out.
Once I began writing novels myself, over and over and over, I learned to step into my own voice, listen to my own prompts, but I brought the stamp of my influences with me. Having the lineage of Bradury, Erdrich, Esquivel, King, and Flanders to rely on, my work emerged more fully as my own. I can see the threads of the influences, but my books now are also born out of my life and experiences and the books I’ve already written.
Maybe my work is part of someone else’s lineage—I hope so. I hope I continue to evolve and absorb new ideas and lessons, too.
Let’s discuss. What is your lineage as a writer? Who can you point to as the main influences on your work? Who are your teachers, grasshopper?
*Writing by hand the passages of another writer is quite an illuminating exercise. You’ll see where you want to change their words, and you’ll see the nails and lumber of their paragraphs.
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
Hey Barbara — As with so many elements of writing, this is something that’s invisible to us as we begin, and grows increasingly apparent with time and growth. Looking back, I see so much of what I love about epics in The Far Pavilions and Pillars of the Earth. I see the footprints in the sands of my stories left by Allen Eckert and John Jakes.
In the realm of fantasy, there is Tolkien, of course. But there’s also GRRM and Robin Hobb and Jacqueline Carey. In fact, I think Carey was slightly put off by the similarities. She agreed to read my debut in the hopes of blurbing it, and let me know (politely) that she wouldn’t be finishing it because she found couldn’t focus on her own writing while reading something so similar to it. (Eep.)
I enjoy exploring the idea, and I think it’s valuable to know. Some of these things can be leaned into, while others that are fading might be best eliminated. It’s all about becoming uniquely us. Thanks for starting a fun and useful conversation!
Interesting reaction from Carey. But we see what we want to see, and it’s a compliment. And thank you for mentioning The Far Pavilions. I was watching A Passage to India the other night, racking my brain for the title of that book!
Crane, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe. Ah, the craftsmen of the English language. Like the exercise you mention of copying out a passage from an author we admire, I used similar exercises with my writing students once upon a time. Write out sentences one by one on separate lines and look at the use of sentence length. Highlight all the verbs to see what gives those sentences movement. Strikethrough the adjectives and read the passage without them to compare. Identify all prepositional phrases. These and similar projects help us feel the linguistic energy. It is also useful in analyzing our own works in progress. The classic advice of simply reading a passage aloud remains one of the most useful tools.
It is so remarkable what reading aloud teaches, and I love your variation on the examination of sentences.
I love so many things about this post, Barbara, not least nodding along to most of it and remembering how enchanted I was by the books and authors that shaped me when I was younger.
But also, unsurprisingly, for the way you talk about how analyzing these stories deepened and internalized writing craft for you. Analyzing other authors’ stories, good or less good, where you have the objectivity you don’t in your own writing, is my favorite tool for authors, the most profound, immediate, and enduring way to internalize what makes story work.
We pick up a lot by osmosis, just reading our heads off, but when it comes time to dig in, I think we need that analysis. Why does Bradbury feel so light struck? What about the cadence of Like Water For Chocolate knocked me out?
Oh I love this post, wish I had more time to comment today. It was inevitable my first novel would be a romance, from a stash of romances in the grade school library of hot rod bad boys and pearls and sweater new girls in town (think Grease), to Jane Eyre, to the Brontes and then 1980s Kathleen Eagle, I fell in love with story. But other writers made me fall in love with the written word. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a young Man rocked my world with its music, mood and culture. Nabokov with his wit and creativity, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh with his artistic passion, the defiance of Emily Dickinson and all to the soundtrack of 1970s Dylan. I could go on and on, but out of time. I think it’s true our early book loves shape us. Thank you for the post. I’m eager to reread some to see how much they are in my work today.
Don’t know how Jane Austen got omitted. She’s such an influence she’s still in my chosen name, lol.
I couldn’t include all of mine, so I get it. As I’m reading the responses, I keep thinking, ‘oh, yes! Steinbeck! Dylan!”
Great list!
Barbara, thanks for sharing the books that got into your brain, your heart, helping you to become a writer. I could name books I read as a child, and the pervasive longing to write even then. I tried, my mother smiling when I handed her my most recent story one notebooks paper. BUT THAT IS OKAY. We all have our beginnings, and though I have read over and over THE GREAT GATSBY, my sentences do not echo Fitzgerald’s. Again, That’s okay. I believe reading helps create a writer. You cannot begin a story or find your sentences echoing something strong or beautiful, without knowing that READING was often the seed, the beginning. And your post? It helps too.
That longing to write is so often part of our journey. Writers often (not always) know young.
What a terrific post, Barbara. I was nodding vigorously at you mention of devouring all kinds of books. Firm believer in the value of reading, reading, reading, as a great tool for writing. I mention that in every workshop I give on writing, and tell beginning writers to read, read, read, then write, write, write, and read some more. The reading done with a critical eye for what works in a particular story and what might not.
I’ve never done the particular writing exercise you mentioned, but I will be sure to adapt that to my writer’s toolkit.
As for my lineage, the primary influencers have been Steinbeck, Hemmingway, and Faulkner in their abilities to create living characters, set vivid scenes, and write wonderful dialogue. In my earliest childhood when I was obsessed with horses and dogs and western stories the authors I read were Terhune, Farley, Zane Grey, McCormack, McMurtry, and some I can’t recall right now. Not sure what direct influence those authors had on my writing, but the stories sure stirred my soul. In fact, just now when checking something about The Black Stallion, I watched a clip of the stunning race that occurs at the end of the movie and my soul soared. There is such great story telling in the way that scene was filmed and I watch it often to absorb all the messages it has for this horse-lover, as well as a lot of other people who like to see an unlikely hero prevail against all odds and follow their hearts.
When I started writing short stories, my main influencers were Oates, Poe, O’Connor, Chekov, and Twain. From them I learned the varying techniques for writing an entire story in a few thousand words and how to make it as satisfying for a reader as a novel.
Thanks for starting this interesting discussion.
It’s thrilling to read or watch something that you loved in the past and find it holds up. They don’t, always. Rich list of writers there.
Hello Barbara. I hope it won’t seem too obvious to need saying, but before I read anything, the first thing in my lineage as a writer was literal. My parents. Both were college-educated. Both spoke in complete sentences, and both were readers. My point is, I grew up in a household that took words seriously, and used them with respect for language. Whatever literary lineage came later, that’s why I grew up as a reader, and later why I wanted to write.
Excellent insight, Barry. Many of us had the privilege of parents that read to us and spoke many many words a day to us. My most pervasive of image of my mother from my childhood is of her sitting in her favorite chair, reading and smoking a cigarette and drinking either a cup of tea or RC cola. She quit smoking a long time ago, but she still reads more than anyone I know.
…And every Saturday morning, Mother drove us to our local library where her three daughters each chose “next week’s books.” As few or as many books as we wanted. We continued the weekly trek until we each aged into junior high school.
I’m one of the generation of Nancy Drew scientists: women who found her independence and support from her father better than most other stuff we were reading, and ended up studying and working in the sciences. Give us ANY example of a woman’s capacity to think, and we grabbed it. It’s almost a trope. I always chuckle when I get to talking with another one of us and find the same literary DNA.
My parents had the Great Books – I guess they had tried reading them in California, and took them to Mexico when they moved to Mother’s childhood home. I read, young, what I could understand, because it was in English. Between that and the anthologies my grandmother had from when she taught English in Illinois (the big fat ones with samples of all kinds of English and American literature) and the National Geographics at my grandparents’ house in Mexico City, I had a lot of good examples from Dickens to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery even as a pre-teen. And the Romantic poets. And the NG’s have always been well written.
Having ‘the good stuff’ early and unforced, with educated adults around to answer questions I couldn’t figure out from context, led to me spending a good part of my early life as a bookworm. And I remember volume after volume of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books – those condensations were skillfully done – and I went through many stories I might not have been exposed to until much later, if at all, because they were there.
Oh, Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, our intrepid heroes! What a rich reading smorgasboard you were offered as a child. I want to sit down and read right along with your young self.
Barb, I love this post–your lineage. We are what we eat! My earliest food: Bible stories, Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, AJ Cronin, Lloyd C. Douglas. In high school and college, Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Stephen Ambrose, Victor Hugo. Baby years, becoming a writer–oh so many Indian authors, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and children’s, Katherine Patterson, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, Laura Amy Schlitz, Kate diCamillo, Eric Carle, and during this time also many Catholic writers, Flannery O’Connor, Fulton Sheen, GK Chesterton, Thomas Merton and I continue to discover wonderful new and old writers. The saints have left a treasury!
When I was asked to write a biography for a writing class nearly 20 yrs ago, what came out was a biography of books. I wrote about it here: https://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-biography-in-books.html
I love the wonderful photos on your bio, Vijaya! And great post.
Thank you.
While researching “women’s fiction” ~18 years ago — before what it meant to write wf was clearly understood — an article recommended Ruth Wind. I read In the Midnight Rain and your other works, and substance and voice both spoke to me. And then I reached out to you with a hundred questions, and you were so kind to answer them and offer encouragement. So thank you, Barbara; you have definitely been one of my teachers, and I’ll be forever grateful–and forever a fan.
Write on!
And now you’ve influenced me. ❤️
Barbara, I just started reading the NYT Magazine’s piece call “Beginners” and it’s interviews with artists of all stripes and how they begin, and their influences, of course, are a big part of what drives them. You can check it out here (if you haven’t already): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/t-magazine/beginnings-culture-artists.html
As for me, comic books (Superman, Dr. Strange, Thor, Wonder Woman, Archie and Veronica), then Mark Twain, the wise guy wise man, Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Annie Dillard, Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, and a thousand brave and likely mad authors typing away in the attics of their minds. Oh, and the first edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia (1969, 2337 pages), because I derived joy from being able to name the heights and weights of many players along with their batting averages, to impress … somebody, somewhere, I suppose.
Thanks for another fine post; your writing always resonates.
Thanks, Tom, I’ll look for that.
Oh, yes, comic books, and Hesse, too. I adored Narcissus and Goldmund so much.
When I was very young, there were two things I was impatient to learn: to drive a car and read. So, of course, I learned to read before I started school. Driving a car came much later. Growing up, I practically devoured books, beginning with comic books, moving on to novels. Finish one, pick up the next. Once I began writing in my 40s, I went to the genre I’d read most, science fiction.
I was and still am a pantser. Maybe that’s because I don’t know who influenced me most as a writer. I wish I did. I do remember favorite books, books that knocked my socks off. One is The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I also read Alan Eckert and loved his work. I’ve written and published in several genres, just as I’ve read in so many. Thanks for your article. You’ve made me wonder about my own writing.
Love this. Early on books like A Wrinkle in Time (and all of Madeline L’Engles books actually), A Secret Garden impacted me. Characters I could relate too…introverts, girls unsure of themselves, stepping into a new world, dealing with change. (and of course looking back realizing that was because I was an introvert constantly having to step into new worlds as we moved often.) And as an adult I realize the books I’m most drawn to are similar…about real women I can relate to, about women’s friendships, about women making changes in their lives, stepping into new worlds (again as I did so myself with 19 moves with the military world). As I wrote my novel I read and reread so many of these, underlining passages and folding up the pages at the bottom, in many cases pretty much every page. Folding down the page at the top for something I wanted to be sure to revisit to think about for my novel. Filling journals full of notes. All of Elizabeth Berg, Erica Bauermeister, Judith Ryan Hendricks. And of course my character is an introvert stepping into a new world after a sudden change, the death of her husband. I realize too, that nonfiction books played a big role. When we first moved to the Oregon coast for “retirement” I read every book I could find on Second Adulthood, the Third Act, life after 50. Which added to the hundreds of books I read on happiness and positive psychology in life early on for my writing workshop work. Those too, influenced my novel in many ways. my lineage for writing and for life. Thanks for the inspiration to reflect on this.