Influenced By

A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers

Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask.

—Jaime Clarke

STEPHEN KING

 © James Leynse

KELLY BRAFFET: When I was a teenager in Pennsylvania, there was this series of very coveted summer programs that only the Super Super Smartieswere accepted into called the Governor’s School. There was one for pretty muchany discipline you can think of, including creative writing; I applied everyyear I was eligible and was declared an alternate every year. It was one of thetwo greatest frustrations of my teenaged life: my inability to get into
Governor’s School, and my inability to get that one dark, tortured beautiful
guy to fall in love with me. Now I’m a published writer, and the last I heard
of Dark and Tortured, he was a heroin addict who beat his girlfriend, so I
think it probably all turned out for the best.

Anyway, as one of the standard questions during the
Governor’s School application interview, you were asked to name your favorite
writers. The first year I answered honestly: John Steinbeck and Stephen King.

“Really,”
the interviewer said dryly. All I remember about him is that he had glasses,
and he very clearly thought this whole
picking-Super-Smarties-for-Governor’s-School thing was an enormous pain in his
ass. “And what do you like about Stephen King?”

His characterizations, I said, and the vividness with
which he captured the world around him. The snap and crackle in his language;
the way he built tension. I think it was a fairly good answer, given that I was
sixteen, but—

as I’ve said—

I didn’t get in. The next year, the interviews
were done by the exact same bespectacled killjoy, only this time, when he gave
his opening remarks before dragging us into his office one at a time, he
actually said, “So when I ask who your favorite writer is, you probably
shouldn’t say Stephen King.”

Shameful little sheep that I was, I didn’t, even though
it still would have been the most truthful answer. (Perhaps even more so,
because that was the year that I discovered the Dark Tower series, the first
three books of which will go down forever on my Best Books Ever list.) I’m sure
I said Steinbeck again, and probably also added Fitzgerald, both of which were
also truthful answers in their own way, but I...