Uh that ubiquitous phrase. The writer's writer. Dostoevsky? Tolstoy? Faulkner? Hemingway? David Foster Wallace? Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Who is it? Who is it that makes you want to pick up a pen and start writing? Or well... may be your laptop. Who is it that has made you want to scream - damn I know that! I mean I know that so well, I could say that in a prize winning way.

Or who is it that when you write you suddenly realize that you have unconsciously been writing like. Someone you might have only read now for the first time but something about the structure (oh that lofty word!!!) the technique (stop it!) and the intensity makes you feel like - well - home.

Lets throw some names and here and then - lets churn them over. What say?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as you mentioned.
Shakespeare
Neil Gaiman
Hemingway, in some cases
Kurt Vonnegut
Federico Garcia Lorca
Sylvia Plath
Richard Wilbur
e.e. cummings
Charles Bukowski
basically any writer whose style I like, whether it be poetry or prose, and there are so many more who could make this list.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yes. It is strange how one invariable has a couple of writers who are essentially available to the english speaking world in translation.

Marquez is a writer of contemporary lore for me. In his stories and novels I have seen a way in which I can express the reality I see around me - reality whose existence is perhaps best understood as folk. And yet he somehow makes it unlike folk - somehow very personal - like you stepped into this ethereal world. In his autobiography he repeatedly mentions "Arabian nights" as the influence in his type of story telling - a sort of grandmother's tale. In a world that appreciates reality, ideally, such lore or folk has no place in the profession of words and yet, because of its exclusion from mainstream we find it fascinating - a sort of Ripley's believe it or not where reality is stretched to the limit until you begin to question your reliance on it.

In his stories and novels Marquez has also added to the way we tell stories. There are no eye winks here nor are there any messages. In itself, like music, it is what you want to interpret it as. A highly subjective writing form leading to a highly subjective interpretation. It reminds me of the first time I read the Lord of the Rings - where more than anything else - I found it hard to believe with the author in the lore of the world he had created, but slowly as I was drawn in by the story - at first I found it hard not to think that somehow this was not based on some re-interpretation of reality - allegory as Tolkien himself says until I proceeded further and got dragged deeper and I realized it does not matter. Why that is so I haven't been able to figure out. But I know that is how I want to write.

Very well said. I certainly agree with you about Marquez, especially. I adore magical realism, and most especially his take on it. I have read Love in the Time of Cholera, some of his short stories, and my favorite, 100 Years of Solitude twice, and I would read it again in a heartbeat. So captivating and luscious and beautiful, like nothing else you'll ever read anywhere again, and yet so familiar all the same. I can completely relate to wanting to write like that.

I am reading David Foster Wallace - Oblivion stories right now. My first impressions are that DFW is a very American writer - he is from that Geographical world, and someone from that part of the cultural world. His stories are set firm within that context. And in a world that has been industrialized, commercialized, commoditized, marketed, super marketed and competed he speaks more truly of whats available on super market shelves than he does about - say, perhaps something as traditionally literary as, flowers. I dont mean to say that one thing is better than the other to write about, but that, he writes better about one than the other.

Is Charles Schulz legit for this list?

stahrwe wrote:?
Is Charles Schulz legit for this list?

Why not?

Alexander Dumas writes characters that appeal to me and make me want to invent some of my own. Reading The Big Book of Shakespeare made me want to write for the first time. There's also Tolkien.

Alexander Dumas - yes - especially the "Count of Monte Cristo". I read somewhere that there is something implicit in the structure of that Novel - how do you get your hero out of the dungeon you have pushed him into deliberately, thinking all the time as he went in that the purpose was to lock him somewhere he cant get out of. I have never loved anything more in that book than the scenes in the dungeon. You cannot help but admire him and hope you can write like that (well not exactly - but you know!)

amarilla ace wrote:Alexander Dumas writes characters that appeal to me and make me want to invent some of my own. Reading The Big Book of Shakespeare made me want to write for the first time. There's also Tolkien.

I definitely have to credit Shakespeare for my love of language and as a large influence on my poetry. I am a self proclaimed Bard nerd.