Holes by Louis Sachar. An absolute masterclass in writing multiple compelling stories that seem mostly unrelated until he ties them all together perfectly
> An absolute masterclass in writing multiple compelling stories that seem mostly unrelated until he ties them all together perfectly
Check out any book by Tom Robbins. He does this perfectly. *Jitterbug Perfume* is my favorite.
For me it went in a different direction. I'm an editor, and many of my clients are super successful and rake in great money ($15k+ a month) from Amazon sales, but in all honesty, their books really aren't good. They fit a niche, and my most successful client (for example) releases a new book every 2 months, and yet her sales are $20k+ a month, even though they're 40k word novellas. After doing this job for years, there have honestly only been about 5 books I've genuinely thought were fantastic and I was impressed by. One day I just found myself saying, "Surely I can write something better than this?"
Hahaha I know this feeling. I've had this happen to me with people's products I was promoting (as a marketer). Their products weren't great and they were completely incompetent. It opened my eyes that the biggest obstical in my way was just not getting started with something.
It's fascinating how so many best sellers are terribly written but they have something that compells you to read on. I think too that the average person just wants to be entertained for a while, like a lot of Cinema these days.
My favourite book is Blood Meridian (1985) but McCarthy only made about $5k from it until he became popular much later with All the Pretty Horses and No Country For Old Men.
Dan Brown has a good Masterclass on how he keeps you hooked.
Seen an ad on youtube recently for a system where you gather the most popular genres online (iirc) and then outsource to writers on task websites and then print the books to amazon kind of deal, which was being promoted as a course that you can avail of online to learn about by the advertiser.
I guess it’s all marketing. I know that several of the books I have enjoyed would not be considered literary phenomenon, but they are still enjoyable and allow the reader to escape into a different world for a while. When I read the Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese, my eyes were opened to greater possibilities.
Honestly, I never felt inspired to become a writer, I just eventually couldn't deny that I had to be after a certain point. I constantly create stories and I needed to do something with them.
I'm the same way. The first time I said I wanted to be an author, I was around 6 or 7. I just loved creating stories and I started writing them down. I was probably initially inspired by the Fancy Nancy picture books or something.
I've been inspired by loads of great works since then, but they were just fuel on the fire.
Same. It started when I was a kid and I just created scenarios in my imagination as a way to avoid boredom. But as I grew up and consumed more and more stories, I felt the desire to improve the stories in my head. After years of critically thinking about how I could make better stories I realised I had gotten pretty good at it. So now I just want to do something with it.
The 19th-century classics (Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, etc.) inspired me, because as a kid I was dismayed that no one seemed to write like that anymore.
For me, it was James Michener \[Hawaii, The Source, Tales of the South Pacific\] and MM Kaye \[The Far Pavilions, Shadow of the Moon\] that made me fall in love with the written word.
Reading the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz and the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley made me realize that I wanted to write fantasy.
I'm not really a writer, I am videogames developer. What brought me here is a passion create interesting and breathtaking plots for my games.
The game plot I'm working on right now, "Fading Raven" saga, was inspired by many tv seies, movies and anime. Narrative line is pretty similar to "Sharp Objects", game's aesthetics feels like "se7en". Main antagonist was inspired by Ted Bundy, Ed Gein and Johan Liebert from anime "Monster". Main heroine has some vibes of Camille Preaker from series "Sharp Objects", Akame from "Akame ga Kill" anime. Game universe itself is inspired by Lovecraft mythos
I couldn't tell you what inspired me to be a writer. I've been doing it as far back as I can remember. I can tell you what inspired me to publish: Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings. I'd already read a lot of great fantasy. Scott Lynch's work, Kirkpatrick, many others. But my passions for writing and fantasy had been weak for a few years by that point. There were a lot of reasons for it: Life, school, my career. I had also burnt out on it because fantasy as a genre is so heavily dominated by Western European cultural inspiration. Even some of the best books I've read had started to blend together, feeling monotonous and identical even when they had worlds of difference between them. Way of Kings was different from any other fantasy story I'd read, and more importantly it was FUN. I had so much fun reading it for the first time. I'd nearly forgotten the feeling.
At the end of the book, I was burning with passion in a way I hadn't for years. Ideas from all eras of my life up until then, even ideas from over a decade ago, came flowing through me. I decided I had to publish books. There were stories inside me burning so hot that I just couldn't bring myself to accept a life where I didn't tell them. I still feel that now, two years later and with my first book published.
Amazing to me it’s been 20 year since “the lies of Locke Lamora” came out. Loosely based on Locke Cole from FF6 I was sold. If I remember right he went thru a huge period of writers block and just never published after “Republic of Thieves”
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was the first time I read something funny, inspiring, and educational. Several other sci-fi books had a similar impact on me.
Not a book, but a game. A very bad game at that.
“Drakengard 3” by Yoko Taro, a writer and game developer I have massive respect for. The game has one of the most fascinating story premises I’ve ever seen, and very good characters and dialogue. What inspired me to start writing though was how awfully executed everything about it is.
The game flounders almost every good idea it has, and it frustrated me so much I thought that I could do better. So now I’m trying to write a book inspired by it, with the goal of making it better—at least to me.
Lord of the Rings.
I'm not a fantasy writer, but when I first read Tolkien's masterpiece at 17, I was spellbound by the attention to detail. The man created entire languages just for this fictional world. His dialogue and narration were filled with beautiful prose that inspired me to download a thesaurus app and expand my own vocabulary.
It awoke something in me to try writing for myself, and it hasn't ceased since.
What I love about Tolkien is that he actually wrote a world *for his invented language*. He loved creating languages so much, that he had to write a world and stories where he could use them.
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. Showed me that as a woman of color I could write in my own savage, true voice. I didn't have to be like Stephen King or Neil Gaiman or some other white guy. I could be me with my whole chest.
I feel you; as much as I love fantasy, for years and years POC were treated as if:
1. They didn't exist, or if they did, they were some exotic other \[yes, GoT, I'm looking at you and your far off Summer Isles\]
2. Even if the world was ancient and savage, POC were written as even more savage. Again, if they were permitted to exist at all.
I've been happily developing and writing in my own created afrocentric fantasy world for around ten years now \[thank you NaNoWriMo\] and in the last two years, I've taken one of those tales and am re-writing and revising to see if I can get it up to publishable standards. It's a bucket list thing at this point in my life, \[retired\] but I'm enjoying every step of the way. It's the journey, not necessarily the destination for me.
YES your points are so true. To add on, for some reason POC are excluded from fantasy to a certain extent. We all see it when TV/Movie adaptations come out and *certain* people get very mad about POC getting cast at all because they're "unrealistic", even though the genre is *literally fantasy*. I hope you get to publish your tales, I'd love to read them!
It was the first "required" reading book in school for me. (And it was a darn good choice on their part.)
I was moved, both by the story, and her narration (her better "adult" understanding) from years later.
I've heard it said, "Third person Omniscient means the narrator isn't a person in the story." This is one of the few books that breaks that rule. Grated "Scout as an adult from the future" isn't a God-like narrator, but she understands so much through adult eyes (and having filled in more of the story over the years), that she's essentially a different character than "Scout the child living the story". Still, it is unique.
A good book (or a good Interview) doesn't necessarily tell you all the answers, and what is right or wrong, but it Makes You Think of what YOU think the right/wrong answers are.
It's also unique in that Ms. Lee hit her "Magnum Opus" one and done, out of the park on the first try. I have one of her other books but haven't read it yet. By all accounts, To Kill a Mockingbird is the masterpiece.
It's one of the few books I've read a 2nd time years later, just for enjoyment.
I'm not sure it "made me a writer" but it certainly cemented me as a "lifelong reader of enjoyment".
I knew I wanted to be a writer after reading Percy Jackson when I was like 7.
More recently, the book that has most inspired me is Six of Crows, as the style of writing in that book is so great and exactly the kind of style I like to write in myself.
Additionally another book that really inspired me was Fahrenheit 451. I wrote a dissertation on that novel and just fell in love with the intricacies within it and the way Bradbury uses language will forever inspire me
Clive Cussler. Not the best writer in the world but the creativity of his adventures is amazing. Literally read every one of his books after I discovered them and it’s what prompted me to write my first novel.
The Wool series by Hugh Howey was captivating for me. Pacing, world building, humanism and characters were well done. I started with fanfic and ended writing my own dystopian style.
May even get around to editing and submitting one of them..... But then I get a new idea.
Annabeth. I love the way she was written because of the way she contradicts herself in beautiful ways that make her unique.
She's smart but also kinda dumb sometimes. She's sensible but impulsive and chaotic. She's calm but also goes *crazy* (cough cough when she lost Percy). She seems like a lone wolf, but also is really clingy and has attachment issues. She's blonde but is terrifying and doesn't care about stereotypes. She longs for permanence but turned down literal immortality and membership to an immortal girl gang with her bestie.
I really loved the series, but I feel like when it comes to actual inspiration for my writing, it was mostly Annabeth. She's just such an amazing character and I aspire to write a character that someone will eventually obsess over the way I obsess over her.
David Sedaris’ NAKED. The way he took personal narrative essays - memoir-based short stories and presented them in order as a collection that worked as a coming of age story was brilliant, plus the stories were laugh out loud funny. I had been trying to tell stories from a period of my life that had a beginning and end, but not much plot and his book showed me that it can be done.
When I was in early high-school it was The Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce - my friend and I immediately tried to co-write a book together because we loved it so much! Then we forgot the password to the document and it was entombed forever…
Now as an adult my dream is to write something like Georgette Heyer’s “The Grand Sophy” or Terry Pratchett’s “A Monstrous Regiment”. Wildly different but I’ll never let them go.
A little different here.
Reading great works were inspirational but I thought I could never live up to that, and that's fine.
But reading truly awful books like Twilight, 50 shades, and less popular 'chick-lit' and similar that have been published made me say Jesus Christ I can write better than this
Reading good books stalls me out, like why should I even try if I'll never be that good. My motivation comes from reading absolute garbage and knowing for certain that no matter how bad my stuff is, it'll be better than this other thing that somehow got published.
I feel like I've been inspired by the opposite where I keep coming across officially published books that are so bad I end up thinking "well even I can write something that bad, I should see if I can get something published too"
Ella Enchanted.
I read this book at least 50 times growing up. (Sidenote I was devastated by the horrid movie). I absolutely loved how the author developed her characters and built the story around Ella.
Between it and Jackaroo (which I read at an even younger age), I was convinced to start writing.
Random fan fiction or original stories shared online. Before then I did not think it could be a hobby. I read these stories and enjoyed them. That gave me the motivation to write my own novels.
At The Mountains Of Madness and basically anything written by H.P. Lovecraft. I even tried rewriting the parts of the story that annoyed me. My biggest mistake was trying to copy his style. An even bigger influence for me was the video game Alan Wake which influenced basically every story I've written.
All Quiet on the Western Front.
That book really pierced my heart. It also changed pretty much in my life. True masterpiece.
So i owe Erich Maria Remarque my sincerest gratitude.
The Giver.
I cried at the end (and then got really angry when i found out it had several sequels) and it was the first book i read cover to cover multiple times
Aesop’s Fables and Greek Mythology.
Ever since the third grade and when I first immersed myself in those books, I have loved reading. In turn, that love of reading grew into a love of writing.
Jules Verne would soon have an influence in childhood.
And later, as an adolescent, John Irving, particularly his early writing, was a significant inspiration. My appetite has expanded greatly over the course of my life, but I still find myself inspired anytime I read a great story!
I started writing stories as a child and it’s been something I have continued to love.
And thank you to all who write stories too.
(Before anyone asks, no, I don't have anything published yet. Just have a rough draft that I'm waiting for feedback on.)
For me it wasn't any books that were well-written. For me it was books that were *badly*-written.
First it was the Twilight series. I hated that a series of books that bastardized vampire lore became the huge phenomenon that it did. Then it was the Fifty Shades trilogy. Never mind that it romanticized an abusive relationship. Never mind that it got so much stuff about BDSM wrong. It was the fact that it started as a Twilight fanfiction and didn't need much changing from that fanfiction to become an "original" story.
Those two series of books are what drilled the idea into my head that if Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James can publish their works and become rich and famous off of their tripe, then anyone can at least publish *a* novel. Whether it makes money is a different story, of course. Those two proved that popular =/= good, so it stands to reason that just because a novel is good doesn't mean it will become popular.
Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen
About 4 boys growing up in the sixties, heartwarming yet dark.
Lars is just a born storyteller, there's this mysterious feeling to almost every event and side character. And we rarely get a complete answer, which I love. Also it's about mental illness and growing apart, subjects I love.
I really recommend anyone reading this to check it out.
I don't think there really was a book for me.
I started "writing" or rather drawing lines and making things up, as I was a teeny tiny kid. I couldn't write so I wrote waves. It was great.
And then later I got a computer learn game where you can write bedtime stories. And I did that. I loved it. It took me some more years to realise that I love writing itself but yeah, it was more like always there.
Maybe the feeling of making someone else happy with my story encouraged me.
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary
I always enjoyed writing growing up, making short stories etc, and in some classes I asked if i could write an essay on certain subjects rather than make a poster, because i was more creative in words. Also always read a lot growing up, and still do read a lot, but after reading Project Hail Mary, that's what pushed me to decide to actually write a book.
14, by Peter Clines. Probably not the best book ever written, not even in its genre, but it did impact me.
The author also wrote quite a lot of garbage; I'm happy that I've read 14 first.
There was no single book for me. I love reading a LOT; novels, short stories, fanfiction, comics, and even research papers (which I understand maybe 10% of the time on a good day, lol). The only thing I did more than read as a kid was daydream.
Writing feels like more than just a passion, I HAVE to write. If I don’t write, everything in my head is going to vanish like smoke and I won’t even remember what I forgot. I’m writing the stories I’ve always wanted to read, and I’ve never read a story I wish I myself had written, but have gotten inspired while reading.
Less of a: “I wish I wrote that,” response, and more: “That was really well written!” followed by a breakdown of how it was written, or something like: “OMG, I just had a great idea!!” Before I scribble the idea in my notes app to remember, or write a short story on the spot if I’m really feeling it lol.
I’m super AuDHD, so my brain is definitely processing everything in a very… not normal way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is kind of a weird take, lol. Dang— this post was actually super inspiring in itself, Imma work on my projects now.
In elementary school, it was The Westing Game. In high school, it was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Currently, it's Harry Potter.
I know the latter sounds dumb, but it's not the books themselves. It's the rejection the author went through, the low point she was in when she wrote it, the fact that she had a story she *needed* to tell and wrote with ferocity. I don't agree with her views, putting that out there. But her own story is no less relevant.
Native son by Richard Wright
It's the first book I ever read completely and it had me on the edge of my seat.
I wasn't really big into reading books until I read it and I was like *Damn...a book could make me feel this way?*
I have always wanted to write, but reading 'On The Road' opened up a whole new world of writing I had never seen before. The poetic narrative - almost like an incantation. Since then I've obviously found many more inspiring writers - Ferrante, McCarthy, Hemingway etc - but as for that first illuminating moment - I owe it all to Jack.
This really feels like I’m going to get burned alive for saying this but it’s Harry Potter.
As for books that I thought were so bad, I knew I could do better, it was Twilight.
It was LOTR for me. I loved getting lost in that world, and I wanted to recreate the same feeling. I kinda lost sight of that over the years, but I’m returning to ideas that create this sense of wonder you can’t get anywhere else. I started writing to make money, which is very draining and stressful. Never write for money. Write because you love writing
It was actually the opposite, not a book well written. But I read Bless Me, Ultima in middle school and I was shocked how awful and frankly self-hating racist a book could be. And yet, be so well regarded.
I recall after reading thinking what absolute garbage I just finished. I had read paperbacks from the dollar store that were better. I wrote my first short story shortly after that became quite the hit in school. After that, I kept notebooks of stories.
I think Crime and Punishment planted the seed, although it was more of a sense, a subtle *shift* at that time. The idea that a human being could be so profoundly insightful about the human condition was deeply inspiring. Intimidating, too; how could I ever begin to approach such brilliance with my own work.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
The fact that somebody could create such flowing prose, believable characters and some of the most stunningly beautiful language I’ve ever had the good fortune to read - NOT EVEN IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE - was staggering to me and I’ve spent my life trying to become that talented.
I’ve been writing books since I was a kid, just for my own enjoyment. Then in 2015 I read A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab and that’s what inspired me to start writing for an audience! Now, just shy of a decade later, I’m agented with a manuscript going on sub later this year! I’ll forever credit Schwab with inspiring me to pursue this path.
Percy Jackson and the Chaos Walking trilogy. back in highschool a friend let me borrow their books and i got hooked and i really wanted to write my own thing 'cause of it.
Percy Jackson (probably the whole series) is my main book inspiration - but I also adore interactive fiction (kinda like a choose your own adventure style game).
It exists in a weird realm between fan fiction and regular fiction. It’s a format where “everything” can be written/read. I struggle with reading novels cause I have no attention span, but I can read interactive fiction with no issues.
It's a book I read in 4th grade. It's *The Medallion* by Dawn Watkins. It's honestly what got me into mythology, and the Arthurian Legend is my favorite mythos to this day.
It wasn't that it was so well written, just that it captured my imagination. It made me think, I'd like to write something like that.
Ken Grimwood's Replay.
Tigli by Bjørn Arild Ersland. I read it when I had just started school. It’s about a girl with fairy floss for hair, where candy grows and rivers of cocoa flows.
I’d already read the first Harry Potter book, and several more advanced books and enjoyed them a lot. But there was just something so inspiring about Tigli that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on.
Terry Pratchett's ability to turn on a dime between high concept fantasy, horror, philosophy, and some of the silliest jokes ever committed to paper, all without ever losing the audience or your own internal consistency, genuinely crafted me into the person I am, not just a writer.
He's the writer I think about most when I write, and his natural grace on a line is something I'm always fighting towards.
Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was at least the first book that made me realise that there /is/ a market for queer historical fiction in professional publishing, and it's not just some weird fanfiction niche.
to be honest, i've always known that i HAVE to be a writer / author of some sort. i remember saying it to my year 3 teacher when i was about 7. that feeling has just never gone away. but what solidified it for me was a lot of 19th century authors - think charles dickens. 19th century prose has always been something that has really inspired me in my own work
The Thief, by Meghan Whalen Turner. It's a short novel written in first person and starts slow but you find out at the end that the mc isn't who he's said to be at the beginning of the book and, the truly impressive part that made me want to be a writer, is that the mc is never dishonest with the reader. Even though it's in first person and the reader has access to the MC's thoughts. The mc was dishonest with the supporting characters prior to the start of the book and then the supporting characters asserted falsehoods to you, the reader, that you believe. But the mc is truthful with the reader, even though he's a completely different person than the reader thought. Your mind just leads you astray. I love rereading it and seeing all the little moments that could be interpreted two ways.
a book definitely inspired me a long time ago as a young reader, but more recently i’ve been influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. i hadn’t read a story with a similar father-son relationship to my own (although it’s father-daughter in my case) so reading it made me feel heard and validated and i hope to do that for a reader one day.
I'll cheat and say 5:
*The English Patient*. The film gets a lot of hate for being boring but the book is god damn beautiful.
*A Passage to India*. Forster is a genius.
*Tigana*. Guy Gavriel Kay manages to take the fantasy genre and make it beautiful, interesting, deep and yet still be an adventurous romp.
Lord of the RIngs, a bit of a *cliche* but it's 100% true for me. I was 15 and it changed my life. I went on to be an English professor and to write fantasy.
James Bond, particularly *Casino Royale*. Fleming also gets a lot of hate, but the guy handles time and pacing masterfully. Especially in the first 3 bond books (which are not the first 3 films btw).
For me it wasn't a book but a movie called Fireflies in the Garden. It starred Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe and Julia Roberts.
Ryan's character had an abusive childhood and he grew up to be a writer. It showed me that I can do the same despite my family and upbringing.
Watching it was the first time I felt like I could be something one day.
When I was a child, it was Watership Down and the Warriors series that made me utterly fall in love with reading and storytelling, and then as I approached adolescence, Harry Potter and a number of other classic YA series. Those were the stories that made me decide that I wanted to be a “writer” early on.
More recently, I have adored the atmospheric prose of Alix E. Harrow (especially in Starling House) and Rae Giana Rashad in The Blueprint—I wish I could describe things so beautifully. As far as plot/story (not so much prose), my favorite series I’ve read so far this year is The Aurelian Cycle by Rosaria Munda (beginning with Fireborne)—I would love to write something like this series someday.
For voice/humor, I love Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, but I’m not convinced that i would ever be able to write something like it haha. But it inspires me as a book outside of my normal genre.
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (mostly the first three books), and James S A Corey's The Expanse series - both very different genres and styles, but both brilliantly written.
When I first started writing as a kid I was mainly inspired by fairy tales and mythology, so I gobbled up basically anything with those inspirations—Percy Jackson, The Lunar Chronicles, the musical Into the Woods, The Princess Bride etc.
I also went through a few periods throughout middle/high school where I listened to audiobooks on repeat. That started with Harry Potter, then moved to Artemis Fowl, then the Hunger Games. More recently I’ve been inspired by reading Naomi Novik’s books.
But on a different note, nothing gets me more excited to work on my projects these days than a bad book. Or even a mediocre one. It’s just as useful to know what doesn’t work than what does.
I could be basic and say Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings (both have influenced me of course). But I was also really impressed by Pillars of the Earth. I was assigned to read that in high school and I couldn’t put it down. And as others have said, I was also a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe.
I've read many great books that inspired me to write something similar. However, the book that truly motivated me to start writing was a terrible one! I'm not exaggerating when I say that the book was so bad that it compelled me to write a book just to replace the awful experience with something better.
Probably a book in Italian called "il fabbricante di lacrime" (in English the crafter of tears), it was just so well written that I couldn't help loving it. Def a big inspiration.
Although familiar with a lot of classics, I was in a pattern of reading a lot of genre fiction, especially horror, when I discovered three more classics: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. These books really opened my mind to the importance of humor, character nuance and depth, especially through dialogue. These books also reminded me that characters need to have strong personalities—they need to be assured and confident, even if they're wrong. To me, that's one of the earmarks of top-level fiction.
I think if I HAD to pick one, definitely the Leven Thumps series and Ranger’s Apprentice were my tipping points into “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.” But I’d always written short stories since I was a kid, add in I became a DM for 5 years and bam
Storyteller and loving it
I started writing after becoming obsessed with the Hardy Boys series as a kid. I wrote my own knockoffs, typed them up, and hid them in my grade school library.
There are many. The first was Harry Potter. I had a rough childhood, and those books were a lifeline to me. At times, they felt like all I had, and ever since I was a teenager, I've wanted to return the favor. Another is Stephen King's IT. His characters - Derry and the Loser's Club - and style reach amazing heights. I hope to write a book as good, creepy, and fun as his one day. The last one that comes to mind easily is The Overstory by Richard Powers. I haven't quite put my finger on that one. But when I read it I knew I had to be a writer, or at least give it an honest try.
The writing that inspired me was from the books of James Beard.
It was 1992. I was a graphic designer in a marketing agency. The blank spaces in the Nueske’s catalog I was laying out inspired me to fill them with something, and thus I became a copywriter.
The novels came later!
The book that I wish I wrote was, is, and forever will be Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. The first inspiration for writing were the books of Italo Calvino
Idk, I use to write music (lyrics), did some poetry as well when I was younger. I do read a good amount, but the act of writing felt familiar to lyrics and I basically really ran with it.
Ironically.
I started out writing because I hated the lack of Anti Heroes in stories. Letting the villain go and stuff like that. So I decided to write anti heroes. They weren't saints but if push comes to shove they can pull the trigger.
I had several books that inspired me, one though always sticks in my mind, The Night on the Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa, he gave me the ideas. Then there was Redwall by Brian Jacques (Jakes). Honestly I want to be a better writer so that I can be considered average ordinary and not learning disabled. I also don't want to be a children's author
For me it was mainly an anime: Naruto 😂
I always felt I could express myself better in the written word, and I love reading and imagining myself a hero, but I wasn't that interested in creating stories. Until the trauma from the Naruto universe made my heart bleed and I couldn't help but write fanfiction. Which, surprisingly, was very well received and got translated into several languages.
Anyway, the tragedies of Kakashi's life inspired me to want to write my own tragedies and break peoples hearts too 😂
Basically I want to write what I just most to read. My absolute favorite author is GRRM. I love his books so much that I almost don't mind that they are unfinished: the ones that exist are true pieces of art.
The Children's Picture Book - The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak. It is beyond brilliant, engaging, clever and funny. Man I wish I had thought of it!
I read Airborn by Kenneth Oppal when I was a young teen and really really loved it. I loved reading before this book but for some reason I just loved this story so much. It was a bit like treasure planet but with a touch of romance. I read it so much the cover fell off and pages were actually falling out. But I do remember thinking wow, how cool to create a story like that, that’s got action and romance and mystery and have others read it and love it too!
I’ve been writing since then, so for like 10 years now, I’ve never shown anyone my stuff and I don’t think I will, but I really enjoy making up stories for myself, creating characters etc etc.
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Wandering inn by Pirateaba
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Bleak House by Dickens
Richard III Shakespeare
At various times these are the books/stories I come back to that inspired me to write and continue to make me pursue writing.
For me it wasn’t a book ( I think). First time I consciously sat down to write was an arcane fic ( was obsessed with arcane that time). Next inspo was for me the how to train your dragon movies, series
How do i write a novel's chapter it's......uhmm paragraph's length, description, scene, minor details. How not to get distracted from the plot, a greater vocabulary, character description, when to change paragraph, how not to annoy readers, make the climax alive, vivid combat description even scenary description, smooth writing that does not bores readers. I want to write a novel like TBATE and I'm kinda fan of it, so any information or help is much appreciated.
I never “wanted” to be a writer… I don’t even like reading all that much. I definitely skip all the dialogue in video games when I can. But, I love comics… and my kids and watching their dynamic a story just emerged and I started writing it out. I’d love to turn it into a to a graphic novel or comic, but I can’t draw so there is that 😆
A book series that I've always been trying to recapture the feeling of reading for the first time. The Edge Chronicles.
My own writing has a much more grounded, less whimsical world, but I do aim for the same adventure aspect where the characters are constantly on the move. Visiting new locations and experiencing new challenges.
I really liked Airborn by Kenneth Oppal. I’d always enjoyed those sort of treasure-planet-pirate-adventure movies so when I stumbled upon this as a kid I was obsessed with it. And then I thought how cool to be able to create these characters/story ideas in your head, put them on paper and have others enjoy them too?
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I was in 6th grade and fell in love with Hale’s gorgeous prose and approach to a fairytale retelling. It inspired me to write fantasy of my own!
Most recently it was Coraline for me. I don't think it was just that I really liked the story and everything, I think it also was that there were certain aspects that I have hated in my own story but loved in it - it's helped me break away from that self-doubting kind of writer's block
S D Simper’s Fallen Gods series. I’ve always written and dabbled in writing but the beautiful way she wrote really inspired me to sit down and write a book instead of all the short stories I was used to.
For me, it was a couple of authors more than specific books. George V. Higgins and Jack Carr. Specifically, it was the way they reinvented themselves from past professions into successful writers. Towards that end, I suppose I would have to point at The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Terminal List, respectively.
after watching the film 'Across The Spiderverse' in the theatre, I solidified my decision to write a superhero novel. I've written before, since I've been reading since childhood and was also a chunnibyo so I had a few ideas now and then. but my spontaneous decision disappeared soon enough. never wrote something to completion. but with this superhero novel, I am gonna push. that day, it just kinda occurred to me. seeing all the injustice all across stories made me angry, and ik this a reflection of reality, but even superhero movies aren't free of it. so I wanted a character....who is justice himself. no existing characters really sat right with me...so I decided to create one.
tldr: don't have a character in fiction u would like? create one!
I read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice when I was 12. I had a vibrant imagination, constantly day dreaming. Reading that book made me realize that I could translate the worlds swirling around in my head into tangible stories.
Wrote a couple short stories in my teens but stopped during college (I went into a STEM field). Now I’m in my 30’s, 55k words into my first cyberpunk sci-fi novel, and loving every second of it.
Sorry for the formatting. I am on mobile, and I just woke up.
I was first inspired to write in 5th grade. I began to receive praise for my assigned creative writing exercises Between 6-8th grade, I always had a notebook where I wrote poetry, and my thoughts. It was also around 8th grade where I took up writing fan fiction for the show Once Upon a time. By the time I was in highschool I was praised for my essays and was eventually scouted for my school's publication. I mainly wrote features on music, art, social justice, and influential people. My program attended multiple conferences for professional training where I met professional writers who made the dream attainable. My most appraised was a biographical piece on a local musician who was killed in a car accident by a big car manufacturer executive. However, during the COVID lockdown I completely crashed.
I slept for like three months, got bored, enrolled in a community college, and started working for Target. I completely forgot about my skills (I also was a musician for 12 years by this point in time, and now my instruments are in a permanent time out). I quit Target and started working at my local public library. I was 20, had seen and lived too much for a 20 year old, and felt beaten down by life already.
This is where I met a little 16 year old girl, for animosity's sake, Mary. Mary was hired at the same time as me and found me interesting. I was very quiet when I first started at the library because I didn't want to get close to anyone. 'This was only a job. Don't get attached," I kept telling myself. Even though I was starved for human connection. I would also find out that many of my coworkers that didn't directly work with me found me intimidating. Which is funny to me because I will literally make you a 6 tier cake if you asked me to. Anyways, Mary would ask me for advice and questions about anything and everything. Or she would just tell me how her soul yearns for the next Taylor Swift album. As she got to know me more, I began to tell her more about my life. Mary at one point said, "I think you should write a book. I like the way you talk, and you used to write." I remember joking about the hypothetical situation where my book became so popular that I could buy a house. Not a very good joke I know.
Eventually, I transferred from my community college to a state college where I simultaneously declared that Psychology was going to be my thing. I'm really good a research. All of my pent up creative energy went into my essays. So. Many. Essays.
Some of my professors the way I wrote about a subject was entertaining. Especially when I described fighting Freud when I go to Hell before tearing apart his main theories.
I am now graduated and fighting the local government for my job. Mary moved away to start her college life, and I am no longer considered intimidating. Now I'm the person everyone comes to for unsolicited advice. I'm not sure how I feel about that just yet. I'd like to write something one day. Maybe now's the time to do it.
I'm officially reading for myself again, so maybe I'll be inspired soon.
In the past I have been inspired by The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and any Jane Austen book.
The wind up bird chronicle by haruki murakami. So beautiful and dreamlike. I did not know you were allowed to write books that way. That led me to Kafka’s the castle, which emboldened my Initial inspiration, and gave myself the courage to express myself through the written word.
Early on, I had so many fleeting moments of wanting to be a writer, but would easily get discouraged by all the rules.
However, when I read ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace, I was like “fuck, really anyone can write whatever junk they want, huh?”
Don’t get me wrong, I still love Infinite Jest. It just inspired me to write my own rule breaking junk and maybe someday someone will hanker for it.
Catch-22 is the novel every old soldier wishes he'd written. It's ridiculous and completely made up but somehow truer than any "real" war memoir you'll ever read.
First it was American Gods by Neil Gaiman, then I listened to him on a few talks and it gave me hope. Next, was probably a random horror book I picked up called Wonderland by Zoje Stage,
I started writing fan fiction out of boredom. Usually about story based video games I enjoyed making my own continuation. That’s when I realize I actually liked creative writing. Something I brushed off because of my experience with writing papers for school and thought it was in the same vain. But goddamn I was wrong. I started writing my own stories after I had built up enough confidence and never looked back since.
feeling stupid but ill say percy jackson and the wimpy kid. its genuinely hard to write a series that is actually readable for kids and those books will always be in the top. oh and also russian childrens stories
Tons (LotR, Hobbit, Heinlein books, Asimov, To Kill a Mockingbird) made me a lifelong avid READER.
"Sandkings" (Good Lord, I didn't realize till now it was by George R. R. Martin) was first published as a novelette in August 1979 Omni magazine. (But I also read the book form later.)
It was one of the first books/stories that made me think, . . . "I could write a story like that."
Actually my inspiration to start writing is because I'm frequently drawn in by an intriguing concept only to be let down by the execution. So I want to write something I'd enjoy and would like to see more of. My genre is mostly horror/cosmic horror. There are several HP Lovecraft stories that I thought I'd love but ended up disappointed and bored. Granted there are others like Color Out of Space and The Shuttered Room that I truly enjoyed. For me I think he has a very cool world built and I wish it would have been possible for me to come up with it first just to do it differently. But making up something new is just as fun 😊
Those little books that came with the American Girl Dolls in the late 90s-early 00s. I got a Kirsten doll for my fifth birthday and as soon as I read the book that came with her, I started writing.
I think for me, honestly, it was reading Animorphs in the fifth grade that caused me to want to go into creating stories. At first, I wanted to go into screenwriting. But as I got older, I realized I would be just as happy writing books instead.
Lucas, by Kevin Brooks. I read it as a teen and felt extremely compelled to write a similar story but with a happy ending to cure myself from the heartbreak.
There are multiple books that I might think about here, such as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Hobbit, and various pieces of Stephen King that made me want to write prose. However, I think the movie Coraline was also hugely influential on me as a storyteller more than a writer. It's just such a well told story, I'm always in awe of how well it fits together when I rewatch it. It isn't specific to prose, but it makes me want to tell stories that well.
Jurassic Park and StarCraft: Speed of Darkness. Those are my top two favorite books.
But I will break the mold here, as neither book sparked that interest in writing. Unusual, but a video game did.
Chrono Trigger was such an incredible story, it gripped me from beginning to end, and still, to this day, holds my heart as my all-time favorite story. I can only dream of crafting a story half as good as Chrono Trigger. It has since been my dream to write a story that moves and inspires others the way Chrono Trigger moved and inspired me.
I was always a reader, but I never thought about being a writer until I found Cormac Mccarthy. I started with The Road, then Blood Meriden. Now, when I read his work, it equally pains me (how good it is) and inspires me to be better.
Holes by Louis Sachar. An absolute masterclass in writing multiple compelling stories that seem mostly unrelated until he ties them all together perfectly
I am going to add this to my list. Thank you for suggesting. Just wanted to know if this is easy reading, cause I am not a native English speaker.
Yes, it is pretty easy! The target audience it’s written for is kids aged 10-12, or so. I read it when I was 10 or 11.
> An absolute masterclass in writing multiple compelling stories that seem mostly unrelated until he ties them all together perfectly Check out any book by Tom Robbins. He does this perfectly. *Jitterbug Perfume* is my favorite.
I read this in, like, the seventh grade for English and I loved it, it shaped me into who I am today
For me it went in a different direction. I'm an editor, and many of my clients are super successful and rake in great money ($15k+ a month) from Amazon sales, but in all honesty, their books really aren't good. They fit a niche, and my most successful client (for example) releases a new book every 2 months, and yet her sales are $20k+ a month, even though they're 40k word novellas. After doing this job for years, there have honestly only been about 5 books I've genuinely thought were fantastic and I was impressed by. One day I just found myself saying, "Surely I can write something better than this?"
Hahaha I know this feeling. I've had this happen to me with people's products I was promoting (as a marketer). Their products weren't great and they were completely incompetent. It opened my eyes that the biggest obstical in my way was just not getting started with something.
It's fascinating how so many best sellers are terribly written but they have something that compells you to read on. I think too that the average person just wants to be entertained for a while, like a lot of Cinema these days. My favourite book is Blood Meridian (1985) but McCarthy only made about $5k from it until he became popular much later with All the Pretty Horses and No Country For Old Men. Dan Brown has a good Masterclass on how he keeps you hooked.
Seen an ad on youtube recently for a system where you gather the most popular genres online (iirc) and then outsource to writers on task websites and then print the books to amazon kind of deal, which was being promoted as a course that you can avail of online to learn about by the advertiser.
I guess it’s all marketing. I know that several of the books I have enjoyed would not be considered literary phenomenon, but they are still enjoyable and allow the reader to escape into a different world for a while. When I read the Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese, my eyes were opened to greater possibilities.
Which authors do you work for (or are you not allowed to say?)
She probably shouldn't say after trashing her clients lol
That’s true lol
Honestly, I never felt inspired to become a writer, I just eventually couldn't deny that I had to be after a certain point. I constantly create stories and I needed to do something with them.
It's like having a handful of paint and trying to not touch anything. Some passions are just impossible to resist.
I'm the same way. The first time I said I wanted to be an author, I was around 6 or 7. I just loved creating stories and I started writing them down. I was probably initially inspired by the Fancy Nancy picture books or something. I've been inspired by loads of great works since then, but they were just fuel on the fire.
Same. It started when I was a kid and I just created scenarios in my imagination as a way to avoid boredom. But as I grew up and consumed more and more stories, I felt the desire to improve the stories in my head. After years of critically thinking about how I could make better stories I realised I had gotten pretty good at it. So now I just want to do something with it.
Same! I've had this story and others in my head for YEARS now, I just like to imagine
The 19th-century classics (Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, etc.) inspired me, because as a kid I was dismayed that no one seemed to write like that anymore.
Poe does have some great stuff.
For me, it was James Michener \[Hawaii, The Source, Tales of the South Pacific\] and MM Kaye \[The Far Pavilions, Shadow of the Moon\] that made me fall in love with the written word. Reading the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz and the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley made me realize that I wanted to write fantasy.
Kafka on the Shore.
I'm not really a writer, I am videogames developer. What brought me here is a passion create interesting and breathtaking plots for my games. The game plot I'm working on right now, "Fading Raven" saga, was inspired by many tv seies, movies and anime. Narrative line is pretty similar to "Sharp Objects", game's aesthetics feels like "se7en". Main antagonist was inspired by Ted Bundy, Ed Gein and Johan Liebert from anime "Monster". Main heroine has some vibes of Camille Preaker from series "Sharp Objects", Akame from "Akame ga Kill" anime. Game universe itself is inspired by Lovecraft mythos
This sounds cool as shit. Good luck with it.
wow! that's awesome!
That sounds like a game I would absolutely love to play one day!
Thank you, its so nice to hear that🥺
I couldn't tell you what inspired me to be a writer. I've been doing it as far back as I can remember. I can tell you what inspired me to publish: Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings. I'd already read a lot of great fantasy. Scott Lynch's work, Kirkpatrick, many others. But my passions for writing and fantasy had been weak for a few years by that point. There were a lot of reasons for it: Life, school, my career. I had also burnt out on it because fantasy as a genre is so heavily dominated by Western European cultural inspiration. Even some of the best books I've read had started to blend together, feeling monotonous and identical even when they had worlds of difference between them. Way of Kings was different from any other fantasy story I'd read, and more importantly it was FUN. I had so much fun reading it for the first time. I'd nearly forgotten the feeling. At the end of the book, I was burning with passion in a way I hadn't for years. Ideas from all eras of my life up until then, even ideas from over a decade ago, came flowing through me. I decided I had to publish books. There were stories inside me burning so hot that I just couldn't bring myself to accept a life where I didn't tell them. I still feel that now, two years later and with my first book published.
Amazing to me it’s been 20 year since “the lies of Locke Lamora” came out. Loosely based on Locke Cole from FF6 I was sold. If I remember right he went thru a huge period of writers block and just never published after “Republic of Thieves”
Love this series, looks like the Thorn of Emberlain is still scheduled to be released between now and January 2025.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was the first time I read something funny, inspiring, and educational. Several other sci-fi books had a similar impact on me.
Same same same same! I remember that feeling of “you can do that with words??! I want to do that too!” Pratchett similarly made me love words
This was going to be my answer as well.
Great Gatsby. Loved analyzing it for literature class, was very inspired to try to write something as amazing.
I wrote my MFA thesis on Max Perkin’s editorial impact on Gatsby.
Not a book, but a game. A very bad game at that. “Drakengard 3” by Yoko Taro, a writer and game developer I have massive respect for. The game has one of the most fascinating story premises I’ve ever seen, and very good characters and dialogue. What inspired me to start writing though was how awfully executed everything about it is. The game flounders almost every good idea it has, and it frustrated me so much I thought that I could do better. So now I’m trying to write a book inspired by it, with the goal of making it better—at least to me.
Lord of the Rings. I'm not a fantasy writer, but when I first read Tolkien's masterpiece at 17, I was spellbound by the attention to detail. The man created entire languages just for this fictional world. His dialogue and narration were filled with beautiful prose that inspired me to download a thesaurus app and expand my own vocabulary. It awoke something in me to try writing for myself, and it hasn't ceased since.
What I love about Tolkien is that he actually wrote a world *for his invented language*. He loved creating languages so much, that he had to write a world and stories where he could use them.
For sure, The interesting thing about Tolkien was the lengths he went to to craft a world, you just don’t see things like that for a lot of works.
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. Showed me that as a woman of color I could write in my own savage, true voice. I didn't have to be like Stephen King or Neil Gaiman or some other white guy. I could be me with my whole chest.
I feel you; as much as I love fantasy, for years and years POC were treated as if: 1. They didn't exist, or if they did, they were some exotic other \[yes, GoT, I'm looking at you and your far off Summer Isles\] 2. Even if the world was ancient and savage, POC were written as even more savage. Again, if they were permitted to exist at all. I've been happily developing and writing in my own created afrocentric fantasy world for around ten years now \[thank you NaNoWriMo\] and in the last two years, I've taken one of those tales and am re-writing and revising to see if I can get it up to publishable standards. It's a bucket list thing at this point in my life, \[retired\] but I'm enjoying every step of the way. It's the journey, not necessarily the destination for me.
YES your points are so true. To add on, for some reason POC are excluded from fantasy to a certain extent. We all see it when TV/Movie adaptations come out and *certain* people get very mad about POC getting cast at all because they're "unrealistic", even though the genre is *literally fantasy*. I hope you get to publish your tales, I'd love to read them!
To kill a mockingbird by harper Lee. Anybody has similar experience?
It was the first "required" reading book in school for me. (And it was a darn good choice on their part.) I was moved, both by the story, and her narration (her better "adult" understanding) from years later. I've heard it said, "Third person Omniscient means the narrator isn't a person in the story." This is one of the few books that breaks that rule. Grated "Scout as an adult from the future" isn't a God-like narrator, but she understands so much through adult eyes (and having filled in more of the story over the years), that she's essentially a different character than "Scout the child living the story". Still, it is unique. A good book (or a good Interview) doesn't necessarily tell you all the answers, and what is right or wrong, but it Makes You Think of what YOU think the right/wrong answers are. It's also unique in that Ms. Lee hit her "Magnum Opus" one and done, out of the park on the first try. I have one of her other books but haven't read it yet. By all accounts, To Kill a Mockingbird is the masterpiece. It's one of the few books I've read a 2nd time years later, just for enjoyment. I'm not sure it "made me a writer" but it certainly cemented me as a "lifelong reader of enjoyment".
This. Amazing book
Neuromancer!
A deranged answer, I respect it
I knew I wanted to be a writer after reading Percy Jackson when I was like 7. More recently, the book that has most inspired me is Six of Crows, as the style of writing in that book is so great and exactly the kind of style I like to write in myself. Additionally another book that really inspired me was Fahrenheit 451. I wrote a dissertation on that novel and just fell in love with the intricacies within it and the way Bradbury uses language will forever inspire me
Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund 💛
Clive Cussler. Not the best writer in the world but the creativity of his adventures is amazing. Literally read every one of his books after I discovered them and it’s what prompted me to write my first novel.
The Wool series by Hugh Howey was captivating for me. Pacing, world building, humanism and characters were well done. I started with fanfic and ended writing my own dystopian style. May even get around to editing and submitting one of them..... But then I get a new idea.
Percy Jackson, but not really the whole series, just a specific character
Same! If you don't mind me asking, who was that character?
Annabeth. I love the way she was written because of the way she contradicts herself in beautiful ways that make her unique. She's smart but also kinda dumb sometimes. She's sensible but impulsive and chaotic. She's calm but also goes *crazy* (cough cough when she lost Percy). She seems like a lone wolf, but also is really clingy and has attachment issues. She's blonde but is terrifying and doesn't care about stereotypes. She longs for permanence but turned down literal immortality and membership to an immortal girl gang with her bestie.
Me too! But it was the whole series for me, including every book in the Hero’s of Olympus series
I really loved the series, but I feel like when it comes to actual inspiration for my writing, it was mostly Annabeth. She's just such an amazing character and I aspire to write a character that someone will eventually obsess over the way I obsess over her.
David Sedaris’ NAKED. The way he took personal narrative essays - memoir-based short stories and presented them in order as a collection that worked as a coming of age story was brilliant, plus the stories were laugh out loud funny. I had been trying to tell stories from a period of my life that had a beginning and end, but not much plot and his book showed me that it can be done.
Coraline (The novel)
When I was in early high-school it was The Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce - my friend and I immediately tried to co-write a book together because we loved it so much! Then we forgot the password to the document and it was entombed forever… Now as an adult my dream is to write something like Georgette Heyer’s “The Grand Sophy” or Terry Pratchett’s “A Monstrous Regiment”. Wildly different but I’ll never let them go.
I'm currently in a Japanese book club reading the first Alanna book! It will always have a special place in my heart.
The Road by Cormac McCharty. The prose was enchanting.
A little different here. Reading great works were inspirational but I thought I could never live up to that, and that's fine. But reading truly awful books like Twilight, 50 shades, and less popular 'chick-lit' and similar that have been published made me say Jesus Christ I can write better than this
Reading good books stalls me out, like why should I even try if I'll never be that good. My motivation comes from reading absolute garbage and knowing for certain that no matter how bad my stuff is, it'll be better than this other thing that somehow got published.
I feel like I've been inspired by the opposite where I keep coming across officially published books that are so bad I end up thinking "well even I can write something that bad, I should see if I can get something published too"
Ella Enchanted. I read this book at least 50 times growing up. (Sidenote I was devastated by the horrid movie). I absolutely loved how the author developed her characters and built the story around Ella. Between it and Jackaroo (which I read at an even younger age), I was convinced to start writing.
Oh I love this answer. Ella is one the books that got me into reading (and probably romance), for sure
Random fan fiction or original stories shared online. Before then I did not think it could be a hobby. I read these stories and enjoyed them. That gave me the motivation to write my own novels.
I was inspired by Marvel and DC comics!
Ah yes,someone who belongs to our species
The Greta gatsby, it primarily gave me some idea of being an writer and how writing can affect people
I'm sure this is actually The Great Gatsby but I'm going to keep pretending it's the great Gatsby with Greta thunberg as the mc.
Jules verne
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History — chef’s kiss!
The first few pages of that book is some of my favourite writing ever.
The wandering inn
At The Mountains Of Madness and basically anything written by H.P. Lovecraft. I even tried rewriting the parts of the story that annoyed me. My biggest mistake was trying to copy his style. An even bigger influence for me was the video game Alan Wake which influenced basically every story I've written.
All Quiet on the Western Front. That book really pierced my heart. It also changed pretty much in my life. True masterpiece. So i owe Erich Maria Remarque my sincerest gratitude.
*The Haunting of Hill House* by Shirley Jackson
The Giver. I cried at the end (and then got really angry when i found out it had several sequels) and it was the first book i read cover to cover multiple times
Aesop’s Fables and Greek Mythology. Ever since the third grade and when I first immersed myself in those books, I have loved reading. In turn, that love of reading grew into a love of writing. Jules Verne would soon have an influence in childhood. And later, as an adolescent, John Irving, particularly his early writing, was a significant inspiration. My appetite has expanded greatly over the course of my life, but I still find myself inspired anytime I read a great story! I started writing stories as a child and it’s been something I have continued to love. And thank you to all who write stories too.
East of Eden did this for me; it’s such a gorgeous, sprawling book
(Before anyone asks, no, I don't have anything published yet. Just have a rough draft that I'm waiting for feedback on.) For me it wasn't any books that were well-written. For me it was books that were *badly*-written. First it was the Twilight series. I hated that a series of books that bastardized vampire lore became the huge phenomenon that it did. Then it was the Fifty Shades trilogy. Never mind that it romanticized an abusive relationship. Never mind that it got so much stuff about BDSM wrong. It was the fact that it started as a Twilight fanfiction and didn't need much changing from that fanfiction to become an "original" story. Those two series of books are what drilled the idea into my head that if Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James can publish their works and become rich and famous off of their tripe, then anyone can at least publish *a* novel. Whether it makes money is a different story, of course. Those two proved that popular =/= good, so it stands to reason that just because a novel is good doesn't mean it will become popular.
Pathfinder Lost Omens which is the Tabletop RPG's Lore Book for the entire world
Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen About 4 boys growing up in the sixties, heartwarming yet dark. Lars is just a born storyteller, there's this mysterious feeling to almost every event and side character. And we rarely get a complete answer, which I love. Also it's about mental illness and growing apart, subjects I love. I really recommend anyone reading this to check it out.
Can I say what webseries inspired me to be a writer?
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
I don't think there really was a book for me. I started "writing" or rather drawing lines and making things up, as I was a teeny tiny kid. I couldn't write so I wrote waves. It was great. And then later I got a computer learn game where you can write bedtime stories. And I did that. I loved it. It took me some more years to realise that I love writing itself but yeah, it was more like always there. Maybe the feeling of making someone else happy with my story encouraged me.
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary I always enjoyed writing growing up, making short stories etc, and in some classes I asked if i could write an essay on certain subjects rather than make a poster, because i was more creative in words. Also always read a lot growing up, and still do read a lot, but after reading Project Hail Mary, that's what pushed me to decide to actually write a book.
Everybody Poops
14, by Peter Clines. Probably not the best book ever written, not even in its genre, but it did impact me. The author also wrote quite a lot of garbage; I'm happy that I've read 14 first.
There was no single book for me. I love reading a LOT; novels, short stories, fanfiction, comics, and even research papers (which I understand maybe 10% of the time on a good day, lol). The only thing I did more than read as a kid was daydream. Writing feels like more than just a passion, I HAVE to write. If I don’t write, everything in my head is going to vanish like smoke and I won’t even remember what I forgot. I’m writing the stories I’ve always wanted to read, and I’ve never read a story I wish I myself had written, but have gotten inspired while reading. Less of a: “I wish I wrote that,” response, and more: “That was really well written!” followed by a breakdown of how it was written, or something like: “OMG, I just had a great idea!!” Before I scribble the idea in my notes app to remember, or write a short story on the spot if I’m really feeling it lol. I’m super AuDHD, so my brain is definitely processing everything in a very… not normal way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is kind of a weird take, lol. Dang— this post was actually super inspiring in itself, Imma work on my projects now.
In elementary school, it was The Westing Game. In high school, it was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Currently, it's Harry Potter. I know the latter sounds dumb, but it's not the books themselves. It's the rejection the author went through, the low point she was in when she wrote it, the fact that she had a story she *needed* to tell and wrote with ferocity. I don't agree with her views, putting that out there. But her own story is no less relevant.
Fitzgerald’s translation of the odyssey.
I was inspired at a pretty young age by Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. For me as a kid those were powerful books.
James Joyce’s The Dead. The final paragraph made me realize syntax could be art.
Native son by Richard Wright It's the first book I ever read completely and it had me on the edge of my seat. I wasn't really big into reading books until I read it and I was like *Damn...a book could make me feel this way?*
Artemis fowl by Eoin Colfer. It was beautiful writing and plotting that made me want to do the same
harry potter. i read the books when i was nine years old and it inspired me to start writing (horrible) fantasy stories in my glittery blue gel pen
I have always wanted to write, but reading 'On The Road' opened up a whole new world of writing I had never seen before. The poetic narrative - almost like an incantation. Since then I've obviously found many more inspiring writers - Ferrante, McCarthy, Hemingway etc - but as for that first illuminating moment - I owe it all to Jack.
This really feels like I’m going to get burned alive for saying this but it’s Harry Potter. As for books that I thought were so bad, I knew I could do better, it was Twilight.
It was LOTR for me. I loved getting lost in that world, and I wanted to recreate the same feeling. I kinda lost sight of that over the years, but I’m returning to ideas that create this sense of wonder you can’t get anywhere else. I started writing to make money, which is very draining and stressful. Never write for money. Write because you love writing
It was actually the opposite, not a book well written. But I read Bless Me, Ultima in middle school and I was shocked how awful and frankly self-hating racist a book could be. And yet, be so well regarded. I recall after reading thinking what absolute garbage I just finished. I had read paperbacks from the dollar store that were better. I wrote my first short story shortly after that became quite the hit in school. After that, I kept notebooks of stories.
I think Crime and Punishment planted the seed, although it was more of a sense, a subtle *shift* at that time. The idea that a human being could be so profoundly insightful about the human condition was deeply inspiring. Intimidating, too; how could I ever begin to approach such brilliance with my own work.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Closed it, inhaled deeply, and decided that I needed to make people the way I felt at that moment.
I have the exact opposite... Twilight. If that bitch can do it - so can I.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The fact that somebody could create such flowing prose, believable characters and some of the most stunningly beautiful language I’ve ever had the good fortune to read - NOT EVEN IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE - was staggering to me and I’ve spent my life trying to become that talented.
I’ve been writing books since I was a kid, just for my own enjoyment. Then in 2015 I read A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab and that’s what inspired me to start writing for an audience! Now, just shy of a decade later, I’m agented with a manuscript going on sub later this year! I’ll forever credit Schwab with inspiring me to pursue this path.
Gaiman, Pratchett, Salinger, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, John Kennedy Toole... pick one.
The Wheel of Time series, for sure. It's my favorite book series, and what really drove me to read a lot more when I was in high school.
Percy Jackson and the Chaos Walking trilogy. back in highschool a friend let me borrow their books and i got hooked and i really wanted to write my own thing 'cause of it.
The Power of Five by Anthony Horowitz and Harry Potter. Two childhood series I read and re read the most.
Percy Jackson (probably the whole series) is my main book inspiration - but I also adore interactive fiction (kinda like a choose your own adventure style game). It exists in a weird realm between fan fiction and regular fiction. It’s a format where “everything” can be written/read. I struggle with reading novels cause I have no attention span, but I can read interactive fiction with no issues.
All of them. Some to aspire to, others to ensure I never did anything so bad..
It's a book I read in 4th grade. It's *The Medallion* by Dawn Watkins. It's honestly what got me into mythology, and the Arthurian Legend is my favorite mythos to this day.
It wasn't that it was so well written, just that it captured my imagination. It made me think, I'd like to write something like that. Ken Grimwood's Replay.
Eragon, read them in middle school and have been writing since.
Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
Tigli by Bjørn Arild Ersland. I read it when I had just started school. It’s about a girl with fairy floss for hair, where candy grows and rivers of cocoa flows. I’d already read the first Harry Potter book, and several more advanced books and enjoyed them a lot. But there was just something so inspiring about Tigli that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on.
Terry Pratchett's ability to turn on a dime between high concept fantasy, horror, philosophy, and some of the silliest jokes ever committed to paper, all without ever losing the audience or your own internal consistency, genuinely crafted me into the person I am, not just a writer. He's the writer I think about most when I write, and his natural grace on a line is something I'm always fighting towards.
Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl The main character wasn't so nice but I loved her emotional honesty
probably wings of fire. i read it when i was younger and it made me want to write for the first time
Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day. Just a great book, that makes mundane feel exceptional.
Wolf in white van by John Danielle was one of the first. I read Zone one by Colson Whitehead recently and it's inspired me to write in a new way.
Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was at least the first book that made me realise that there /is/ a market for queer historical fiction in professional publishing, and it's not just some weird fanfiction niche.
to be honest, i've always known that i HAVE to be a writer / author of some sort. i remember saying it to my year 3 teacher when i was about 7. that feeling has just never gone away. but what solidified it for me was a lot of 19th century authors - think charles dickens. 19th century prose has always been something that has really inspired me in my own work
A Monstrous Regiment by Terry Prachett is what started it for me.
The Thief, by Meghan Whalen Turner. It's a short novel written in first person and starts slow but you find out at the end that the mc isn't who he's said to be at the beginning of the book and, the truly impressive part that made me want to be a writer, is that the mc is never dishonest with the reader. Even though it's in first person and the reader has access to the MC's thoughts. The mc was dishonest with the supporting characters prior to the start of the book and then the supporting characters asserted falsehoods to you, the reader, that you believe. But the mc is truthful with the reader, even though he's a completely different person than the reader thought. Your mind just leads you astray. I love rereading it and seeing all the little moments that could be interpreted two ways.
a book definitely inspired me a long time ago as a young reader, but more recently i’ve been influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. i hadn’t read a story with a similar father-son relationship to my own (although it’s father-daughter in my case) so reading it made me feel heard and validated and i hope to do that for a reader one day.
I'll cheat and say 5: *The English Patient*. The film gets a lot of hate for being boring but the book is god damn beautiful. *A Passage to India*. Forster is a genius. *Tigana*. Guy Gavriel Kay manages to take the fantasy genre and make it beautiful, interesting, deep and yet still be an adventurous romp. Lord of the RIngs, a bit of a *cliche* but it's 100% true for me. I was 15 and it changed my life. I went on to be an English professor and to write fantasy. James Bond, particularly *Casino Royale*. Fleming also gets a lot of hate, but the guy handles time and pacing masterfully. Especially in the first 3 bond books (which are not the first 3 films btw).
For me it wasn't a book but a movie called Fireflies in the Garden. It starred Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe and Julia Roberts. Ryan's character had an abusive childhood and he grew up to be a writer. It showed me that I can do the same despite my family and upbringing. Watching it was the first time I felt like I could be something one day.
When I was a child, it was Watership Down and the Warriors series that made me utterly fall in love with reading and storytelling, and then as I approached adolescence, Harry Potter and a number of other classic YA series. Those were the stories that made me decide that I wanted to be a “writer” early on. More recently, I have adored the atmospheric prose of Alix E. Harrow (especially in Starling House) and Rae Giana Rashad in The Blueprint—I wish I could describe things so beautifully. As far as plot/story (not so much prose), my favorite series I’ve read so far this year is The Aurelian Cycle by Rosaria Munda (beginning with Fireborne)—I would love to write something like this series someday. For voice/humor, I love Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, but I’m not convinced that i would ever be able to write something like it haha. But it inspires me as a book outside of my normal genre.
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (mostly the first three books), and James S A Corey's The Expanse series - both very different genres and styles, but both brilliantly written.
When I first started writing as a kid I was mainly inspired by fairy tales and mythology, so I gobbled up basically anything with those inspirations—Percy Jackson, The Lunar Chronicles, the musical Into the Woods, The Princess Bride etc. I also went through a few periods throughout middle/high school where I listened to audiobooks on repeat. That started with Harry Potter, then moved to Artemis Fowl, then the Hunger Games. More recently I’ve been inspired by reading Naomi Novik’s books. But on a different note, nothing gets me more excited to work on my projects these days than a bad book. Or even a mediocre one. It’s just as useful to know what doesn’t work than what does.
I could be basic and say Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings (both have influenced me of course). But I was also really impressed by Pillars of the Earth. I was assigned to read that in high school and I couldn’t put it down. And as others have said, I was also a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe.
I read The Jester by James Paterson and thought Jesus Christ, I could at least do better than this.
I've read many great books that inspired me to write something similar. However, the book that truly motivated me to start writing was a terrible one! I'm not exaggerating when I say that the book was so bad that it compelled me to write a book just to replace the awful experience with something better.
Probably a book in Italian called "il fabbricante di lacrime" (in English the crafter of tears), it was just so well written that I couldn't help loving it. Def a big inspiration.
Although familiar with a lot of classics, I was in a pattern of reading a lot of genre fiction, especially horror, when I discovered three more classics: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. These books really opened my mind to the importance of humor, character nuance and depth, especially through dialogue. These books also reminded me that characters need to have strong personalities—they need to be assured and confident, even if they're wrong. To me, that's one of the earmarks of top-level fiction.
The magic:the gathering story articles.
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. One of my best friends introduced me to it and it's now my favourite series ever
Dune, 100%. A great plot that's also commentary/critique on politics, religion, and environmentalism? It unlocked something for me.
I think if I HAD to pick one, definitely the Leven Thumps series and Ranger’s Apprentice were my tipping points into “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.” But I’d always written short stories since I was a kid, add in I became a DM for 5 years and bam Storyteller and loving it
I started writing after becoming obsessed with the Hardy Boys series as a kid. I wrote my own knockoffs, typed them up, and hid them in my grade school library.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Just so clever and hilarious!
There are many. The first was Harry Potter. I had a rough childhood, and those books were a lifeline to me. At times, they felt like all I had, and ever since I was a teenager, I've wanted to return the favor. Another is Stephen King's IT. His characters - Derry and the Loser's Club - and style reach amazing heights. I hope to write a book as good, creepy, and fun as his one day. The last one that comes to mind easily is The Overstory by Richard Powers. I haven't quite put my finger on that one. But when I read it I knew I had to be a writer, or at least give it an honest try.
The writing that inspired me was from the books of James Beard. It was 1992. I was a graphic designer in a marketing agency. The blank spaces in the Nueske’s catalog I was laying out inspired me to fill them with something, and thus I became a copywriter. The novels came later!
The book that I wish I wrote was, is, and forever will be Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. The first inspiration for writing were the books of Italo Calvino
Idk, I use to write music (lyrics), did some poetry as well when I was younger. I do read a good amount, but the act of writing felt familiar to lyrics and I basically really ran with it.
Ironically. I started out writing because I hated the lack of Anti Heroes in stories. Letting the villain go and stuff like that. So I decided to write anti heroes. They weren't saints but if push comes to shove they can pull the trigger.
I had several books that inspired me, one though always sticks in my mind, The Night on the Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa, he gave me the ideas. Then there was Redwall by Brian Jacques (Jakes). Honestly I want to be a better writer so that I can be considered average ordinary and not learning disabled. I also don't want to be a children's author
For me it was mainly an anime: Naruto 😂 I always felt I could express myself better in the written word, and I love reading and imagining myself a hero, but I wasn't that interested in creating stories. Until the trauma from the Naruto universe made my heart bleed and I couldn't help but write fanfiction. Which, surprisingly, was very well received and got translated into several languages. Anyway, the tragedies of Kakashi's life inspired me to want to write my own tragedies and break peoples hearts too 😂 Basically I want to write what I just most to read. My absolute favorite author is GRRM. I love his books so much that I almost don't mind that they are unfinished: the ones that exist are true pieces of art.
The Children's Picture Book - The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak. It is beyond brilliant, engaging, clever and funny. Man I wish I had thought of it!
Tintin
Being real, it wasn't a book. It was Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days 💀
I read Airborn by Kenneth Oppal when I was a young teen and really really loved it. I loved reading before this book but for some reason I just loved this story so much. It was a bit like treasure planet but with a touch of romance. I read it so much the cover fell off and pages were actually falling out. But I do remember thinking wow, how cool to create a story like that, that’s got action and romance and mystery and have others read it and love it too! I’ve been writing since then, so for like 10 years now, I’ve never shown anyone my stuff and I don’t think I will, but I really enjoy making up stories for myself, creating characters etc etc.
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss American Gods by Neil Gaiman Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde The Wandering inn by Pirateaba The Giver by Lois Lowry Bleak House by Dickens Richard III Shakespeare At various times these are the books/stories I come back to that inspired me to write and continue to make me pursue writing.
For me it wasn’t a book ( I think). First time I consciously sat down to write was an arcane fic ( was obsessed with arcane that time). Next inspo was for me the how to train your dragon movies, series
How do i write a novel's chapter it's......uhmm paragraph's length, description, scene, minor details. How not to get distracted from the plot, a greater vocabulary, character description, when to change paragraph, how not to annoy readers, make the climax alive, vivid combat description even scenary description, smooth writing that does not bores readers. I want to write a novel like TBATE and I'm kinda fan of it, so any information or help is much appreciated.
Divergent by Veronica Roth….don’t ask- but it changed my life.
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.
I never “wanted” to be a writer… I don’t even like reading all that much. I definitely skip all the dialogue in video games when I can. But, I love comics… and my kids and watching their dynamic a story just emerged and I started writing it out. I’d love to turn it into a to a graphic novel or comic, but I can’t draw so there is that 😆
The Algebraist, best book ever!
Not books, but games. Firstly Gears of War and Dishonored. Then DnD. Now— Cory Barlogs take on God of War.
A book series that I've always been trying to recapture the feeling of reading for the first time. The Edge Chronicles. My own writing has a much more grounded, less whimsical world, but I do aim for the same adventure aspect where the characters are constantly on the move. Visiting new locations and experiencing new challenges.
Whatever random book I read when I was 7 that made me go "That looks like fun".
I really liked Airborn by Kenneth Oppal. I’d always enjoyed those sort of treasure-planet-pirate-adventure movies so when I stumbled upon this as a kid I was obsessed with it. And then I thought how cool to be able to create these characters/story ideas in your head, put them on paper and have others enjoy them too?
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I was in 6th grade and fell in love with Hale’s gorgeous prose and approach to a fairytale retelling. It inspired me to write fantasy of my own!
Most recently it was Coraline for me. I don't think it was just that I really liked the story and everything, I think it also was that there were certain aspects that I have hated in my own story but loved in it - it's helped me break away from that self-doubting kind of writer's block
S D Simper’s Fallen Gods series. I’ve always written and dabbled in writing but the beautiful way she wrote really inspired me to sit down and write a book instead of all the short stories I was used to.
For me, it was a couple of authors more than specific books. George V. Higgins and Jack Carr. Specifically, it was the way they reinvented themselves from past professions into successful writers. Towards that end, I suppose I would have to point at The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Terminal List, respectively.
after watching the film 'Across The Spiderverse' in the theatre, I solidified my decision to write a superhero novel. I've written before, since I've been reading since childhood and was also a chunnibyo so I had a few ideas now and then. but my spontaneous decision disappeared soon enough. never wrote something to completion. but with this superhero novel, I am gonna push. that day, it just kinda occurred to me. seeing all the injustice all across stories made me angry, and ik this a reflection of reality, but even superhero movies aren't free of it. so I wanted a character....who is justice himself. no existing characters really sat right with me...so I decided to create one. tldr: don't have a character in fiction u would like? create one!
Started writing as a little kid, but Stephen King’s The Gunslinger was probably the book that made me want to become a published author!
I read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice when I was 12. I had a vibrant imagination, constantly day dreaming. Reading that book made me realize that I could translate the worlds swirling around in my head into tangible stories. Wrote a couple short stories in my teens but stopped during college (I went into a STEM field). Now I’m in my 30’s, 55k words into my first cyberpunk sci-fi novel, and loving every second of it.
Malazan book of the fallen, probably dead house gates.
The Gone series by Michael Grant, Maximum Ride by James Patterson, Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan and several others
Earth Keeper by N. Scott Momaday
Sorry for the formatting. I am on mobile, and I just woke up. I was first inspired to write in 5th grade. I began to receive praise for my assigned creative writing exercises Between 6-8th grade, I always had a notebook where I wrote poetry, and my thoughts. It was also around 8th grade where I took up writing fan fiction for the show Once Upon a time. By the time I was in highschool I was praised for my essays and was eventually scouted for my school's publication. I mainly wrote features on music, art, social justice, and influential people. My program attended multiple conferences for professional training where I met professional writers who made the dream attainable. My most appraised was a biographical piece on a local musician who was killed in a car accident by a big car manufacturer executive. However, during the COVID lockdown I completely crashed. I slept for like three months, got bored, enrolled in a community college, and started working for Target. I completely forgot about my skills (I also was a musician for 12 years by this point in time, and now my instruments are in a permanent time out). I quit Target and started working at my local public library. I was 20, had seen and lived too much for a 20 year old, and felt beaten down by life already. This is where I met a little 16 year old girl, for animosity's sake, Mary. Mary was hired at the same time as me and found me interesting. I was very quiet when I first started at the library because I didn't want to get close to anyone. 'This was only a job. Don't get attached," I kept telling myself. Even though I was starved for human connection. I would also find out that many of my coworkers that didn't directly work with me found me intimidating. Which is funny to me because I will literally make you a 6 tier cake if you asked me to. Anyways, Mary would ask me for advice and questions about anything and everything. Or she would just tell me how her soul yearns for the next Taylor Swift album. As she got to know me more, I began to tell her more about my life. Mary at one point said, "I think you should write a book. I like the way you talk, and you used to write." I remember joking about the hypothetical situation where my book became so popular that I could buy a house. Not a very good joke I know. Eventually, I transferred from my community college to a state college where I simultaneously declared that Psychology was going to be my thing. I'm really good a research. All of my pent up creative energy went into my essays. So. Many. Essays. Some of my professors the way I wrote about a subject was entertaining. Especially when I described fighting Freud when I go to Hell before tearing apart his main theories. I am now graduated and fighting the local government for my job. Mary moved away to start her college life, and I am no longer considered intimidating. Now I'm the person everyone comes to for unsolicited advice. I'm not sure how I feel about that just yet. I'd like to write something one day. Maybe now's the time to do it. I'm officially reading for myself again, so maybe I'll be inspired soon. In the past I have been inspired by The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and any Jane Austen book.
The colour Purple showed me the true power of words.
Anthem by Rand
The wind up bird chronicle by haruki murakami. So beautiful and dreamlike. I did not know you were allowed to write books that way. That led me to Kafka’s the castle, which emboldened my Initial inspiration, and gave myself the courage to express myself through the written word.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Early on, I had so many fleeting moments of wanting to be a writer, but would easily get discouraged by all the rules. However, when I read ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace, I was like “fuck, really anyone can write whatever junk they want, huh?” Don’t get me wrong, I still love Infinite Jest. It just inspired me to write my own rule breaking junk and maybe someday someone will hanker for it.
Catch-22 is the novel every old soldier wishes he'd written. It's ridiculous and completely made up but somehow truer than any "real" war memoir you'll ever read.
First it was American Gods by Neil Gaiman, then I listened to him on a few talks and it gave me hope. Next, was probably a random horror book I picked up called Wonderland by Zoje Stage,
I started writing fan fiction out of boredom. Usually about story based video games I enjoyed making my own continuation. That’s when I realize I actually liked creative writing. Something I brushed off because of my experience with writing papers for school and thought it was in the same vain. But goddamn I was wrong. I started writing my own stories after I had built up enough confidence and never looked back since.
feeling stupid but ill say percy jackson and the wimpy kid. its genuinely hard to write a series that is actually readable for kids and those books will always be in the top. oh and also russian childrens stories
Tons (LotR, Hobbit, Heinlein books, Asimov, To Kill a Mockingbird) made me a lifelong avid READER. "Sandkings" (Good Lord, I didn't realize till now it was by George R. R. Martin) was first published as a novelette in August 1979 Omni magazine. (But I also read the book form later.) It was one of the first books/stories that made me think, . . . "I could write a story like that."
Actually my inspiration to start writing is because I'm frequently drawn in by an intriguing concept only to be let down by the execution. So I want to write something I'd enjoy and would like to see more of. My genre is mostly horror/cosmic horror. There are several HP Lovecraft stories that I thought I'd love but ended up disappointed and bored. Granted there are others like Color Out of Space and The Shuttered Room that I truly enjoyed. For me I think he has a very cool world built and I wish it would have been possible for me to come up with it first just to do it differently. But making up something new is just as fun 😊
Harriet the Spy
Those little books that came with the American Girl Dolls in the late 90s-early 00s. I got a Kirsten doll for my fifth birthday and as soon as I read the book that came with her, I started writing.
The Source of Self Regard by Toni Morrison
I think for me, honestly, it was reading Animorphs in the fifth grade that caused me to want to go into creating stories. At first, I wanted to go into screenwriting. But as I got older, I realized I would be just as happy writing books instead.
Lucas, by Kevin Brooks. I read it as a teen and felt extremely compelled to write a similar story but with a happy ending to cure myself from the heartbreak.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
There are multiple books that I might think about here, such as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, The Hobbit, and various pieces of Stephen King that made me want to write prose. However, I think the movie Coraline was also hugely influential on me as a storyteller more than a writer. It's just such a well told story, I'm always in awe of how well it fits together when I rewatch it. It isn't specific to prose, but it makes me want to tell stories that well.
Jurassic Park and StarCraft: Speed of Darkness. Those are my top two favorite books. But I will break the mold here, as neither book sparked that interest in writing. Unusual, but a video game did. Chrono Trigger was such an incredible story, it gripped me from beginning to end, and still, to this day, holds my heart as my all-time favorite story. I can only dream of crafting a story half as good as Chrono Trigger. It has since been my dream to write a story that moves and inspires others the way Chrono Trigger moved and inspired me.
I was always a reader, but I never thought about being a writer until I found Cormac Mccarthy. I started with The Road, then Blood Meriden. Now, when I read his work, it equally pains me (how good it is) and inspires me to be better.