It doesn't seem to matter what I read I can compose something from the experience.
Stephen King. Many good writers. SF and fantasy and horror, though I have been drifting more toward fantasy and SF lately than horror. Horror was comforting when my life was so hard it was a walking horror. My childhood would be a horror novel if I wrote it up in detail. I was comforted by knowing Franz Kafka understood how lonely and crushed a human being could get, that I wasn't the only one who got treated like dirt. Nothing in later life has ever been as hard as my childhood, even the homeless shelter only came close and recapitulated being locked up as a teenager -- which was not as bad as living with family.
I read classics like Melville and Sam Clemens too. I read Dickens. I read a lot.
I love and adore Terry Pratchett. Like the King (Stephen, not Elvis), Pratchett is someone I read for style and technique. I read these good ones over and over and on the twentieth reread I start to see some of how he did it -- start understanding technique. Diskworld has a brilliant backstory, as tightly woven as anything in "serious" SF or fantasy. He plays consistent with his rules. It is a chronicle. The first golem gets freed -- a few books later there's a Golem Trust buying and freeing golems and the impact of golems as an ethnic group is hitting Ankh-Morpork. He does plenty of social satire of course, and his world has the depth and richness of a real world even if it's silly and sits on top of four elephants and a giant turtle.
Most authors will give you a good line every chapter, the best every few pages. Pratchett gives you a good quotable on average about six per page. Read one aloud to your friends and you will have party material for a month without repeating yourself. I can't count the number of Pratchett-quoters who have become life of the party at any party. My favorite was the young assassin who crept along the rooftops with a nearly catlike grace, except that he didn't stop to urinate on the chimney-pots.
I think it was Pratchett who taught me to look a cliche right in the eye, grab it by its horns and hit it with my head a dozen times real fast till it gets confused and becomes something else, something original and classic. If I take any cliche and go "But what would it be like if it was REAL?" then it becomes something awesome, it stops being cliche at all and most of the time people don't even recognize its roots. These things become cliches because someone wrote it well and then a thousand others imitated that story thinking the plot or the maguffin was the big seller.
It's how it's told. A good writer could turn my going to the bathroom into a good story.   | | |
All types from cookbooks, newspaper cuttings and autobiographies to fiction by Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood.
I always joke that I hate to read, but I do read Time Magazine avidly. It is my only source for news besides John Stuart. I can't bear to watch TV news, can't trust the propaganda machine. I like to read about contemporary issues. I think it's important to stay on the cutting edge of contemporary philosophies, and I can't do that loosing myself in fiction, so any time I do have to do some extra reading I spend it in quiet contemplation over the fragile state of the world.
Mostly poetry I read from my friends and peers around me. Also just a really deep pyschological mind-boggling thriller or romance novel I've just read. For example, the book Host by Stephenie Meyer is a very inspiring piece.
Some poets inspire me to write. But there are other type of artists, like prose-writers who also inspire me, although it's rare.
A poet reflects the world in they live, and witness, all manner of event is inspirational.
Nothing in particular to be honest.It all depends on the Muse.But good poetry always keeps me inspired.
I don't read much. I especially don't read others poetry as i don't feel that I want to be influenced. Sometimes news articles get me going on a subject/idea.
the types of books written by such authors as dean koontz and piers anthony
Just anything, all textes that are "readable". I am fond of August Strindberg, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Danielle Steel, William Shakespeare, Goethe, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Emily Brontė,Tage Danielsson, Beppe Wolgers, W.B Yeats a.s.o.
I also take a pleasure of reading articles and newspapers, I listen to the radio a lot and love to hear a good debate on radio or watch a debate-program on TV.
(Sometimes when my processor in the skull is overloaded I take a break and read a few Harlequin-novels. They have improved over the years.)
I read the poetry of friends and acquaintances, read poetry online, watch TV in search of absurdities I can turn into humorous essays or blogs. I never stop writing. I write every day, but I can be inspired to make notes for a later poem or prose piece by poetry, fiction, non-fiction & music & art. I can also be moved by philosophy and history.
Reading other fantasy, mythology, folk tales etc., especially from around the world. I'm fascinated in what other cultures believe.
Anything that is well written, and witty. Sorry that isn't more helpful, but I derive inspiration from award winning novels, articles in the economist, and a humourous sign. Anything goes really.
What motivates me to write would be reading politcal minds who know what they write about. Such men as Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Thomas Jefferson, who penned the "Declaration of Independence," stating the reasons that we, the Colonies, were severing their ties with Briton. John C. Calhous, vice-President to Andrew Jackson, in his article, "Disquisition Of Government." And several more that I shall not elaborate on. When writing "Fire From The Sky," and other works, research has always been the most important key to understanding the subject matter. Without research no one can write, with any authority, what the subject matter is that they are writing about. |
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