Discussion → Influence
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The canon is sitting on my head like an eagle.
What effect does influence have on you when you write?
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like the image, ann, though i hate to think of you bogged down by a large predatory bird.
i'm not sure which influence you mean though. i don't write under the influence.
writers that influence me though as far as i know not part of bloom's western canon: dostoyewsky (always), and a bunch of other russian writers (most recent: brodsky, arkadi and boris strugatsky); south american writers like neruda and julio cortazar; above all, unfortunately, joyce. the only american writer whose influence i'm aware of besides hemingway (but that's like saying, as a priest, that you're under the influence of st francis of assisi), is ursula k. le guin and her wonderfully simple elegant style. (too simple for what i'm trying to do but she's in my head nevertheless).
is this what you had in mind? i think it's a brilliant question and i'm looking forward to learning from others who undoubtedly read more than i do. of course all and everything i read on fnaut becomes an influence one way or another.
most of the time, i enjoy a certain unconscious naïvité. i know it's unprofessional but i'm writing to please myself in the first place. call me mona lisa, self satisfied, louvrean.
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This is indeed a great question. I'm severely influenced by my reading and my early writing was termed "baroque" by one and made me realize I was in fact writing like a pseudo-Poe.
Currently, I find reading the flash fictions here at Fictionaut along with poetry keeps me concise and contemporary.
Faulkner, Marquez, McCarthy, Steinbeck all have their hands on my shoulder and upon occasion, I worry that I've written their words instead of my own. I was copyediting for a friend once and had to ask him if a phrase I wrote was lifted from one of his short hyperfiction pieces because it didn't sound like me.
I think the hardest thing for me to understand and relate to was "voice" in narrative and may have finally found my own though it changes as if I stored a closetful of persona in my mind.
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i recall ray carver's answer to this large question--
ray said, my kids. it was always a mess. i only had time to write in snatches, a burst before it started up again.
fires.
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The very short stories at Fictionaut influence me, a new influence. I wrote 300 words in the past; I wrote 1,000 words more often and still do; there are writers at F'naut telling stories in 140 words. Under 500.
Gordon Lish and I used to correspond a bit, when he pub'd a few of my stories in the late 80s. He was not shy about suggesting that U educ's in cw were a waste of time, that his workshop would have served me better. Then I did the U hoo twice. The U systems in cw create what I call "cw scholars"; some of them are gifted writers. I completed 212 credits & 40 courses in literature. I topped out at $18 k/yr. but in journalism. It is hard to submit to heavy canon studies, end up not using it for anything (much), and needing to circumvent it later to write.
Yesterday I revised my "favorite author" list at my profile upon request: I had not mentioned writers I know. I changed the list entirely to represent working influences. I may change it again. Who could work under so much influence? Like you, Finnegan, I write not under the influence. I reread what I have written on beer, the first pink flush, then edit on coffee.
Precedent is another way of thinking of it.
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as i'm reading this again (i like yr 'precedent is another way of thinking of it.', ann, becauseit suggests greater separation between yourself and what influenced you, which is, i think more real given the differences between us), i keep thinking that the negative influences - still precedents - are perhaps more important than the positive ones.
analogously to ethical education where - contrary to christian hope - it is the crime that indicates where the boundaries are, the bad guys say more about goodness than the good guys ever could.
i routinely force myself to read bad fiction - in bursts not to damage my metabolism too much (hell that sounds snobbish) - and i usually gain a lot from it. some of it is mine (now that sounds self-pitying). it's not pleasure but work, and it's an intoxicating influence.
my second thought as i'm thinking about this brain half hidden behind one eye patch: perhaps we overestimate influence because we're supposed to, i mean the actual effect of it. when i look at what i write and why and how and for whom (ideally, all of it), i can see the little boy i once was, and he is more prominent and louder than all of the voices i gathered along the way.
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Harold Bloom's "The Anxiety of Influence" and "A Map of Misreading" speak to this topic; in particular, his division of poets (artists) into 'strong' and 'weak' - the strong being the few in every generation who are able to forge an original aesthetic by "misreading" the works of their predecessors, while the weak are the many who simply repeat the ideas and forms their predecessors dealt with.
I'm interested in how Bloom depicts the artist as engaged in a sort of Freudian struggle with tradition. A problem involved with describing this struggle as Freudian, however, is that it tends to evoke the struggle as masculine (father-son) as opposed to genderless, which the artistic struggle essentially is.
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