(no subject)

[digitaldiscipline]

Author Meme
1. Pick 3 authors that have influenced your life
2. Tell what works and why
3. Copy this your journal and fill it out.

1. Stephen King. I first picked up his stuff in college, and enjoyed it immensely. "Needful Things" was the first, but far from the last. My roommate (Steve the Jew) and I were reading his copy concurrently, and took to hiding it so that we could get ahead of one another. I think his influence on my own writing is pretty obvious, both content-wise and stylistically. Yes, his "chick period" was unreadable, as was the last half of the Dark Tower series, but he, as with the other two authors that appear here, is the only author whose work I've had to replace because I wore some of it out from re-reading it so much ("The Stand," "Rage," "The Long Walk").

2. William Gibson. Again, from the "let's state the obvious" department. More than just pioneering the c-punk genre, his style emulates the noise in my head.

3. Carl Sagan. "Cosmos" was "Cosmos" before Hawking wrote "A Brief History of Time." A towering achievement; making astrophysics accessible to a ten-year old. In my world, "Contact" doesn't exist.

Comments

[angel-renewed.livejournal.com]

Contact and The Stand are the only books of any of your listed authors that I've read :-)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

that's okay, i haven't read -any- of the stuff you listed, you pretentious bolshevik wanker. ;-)

[angel-renewed.livejournal.com]

Hey, putting HST is actually making the list WAY more accessible. I could have put Emma Goldman - who was really tied for 3rd.

[critus.livejournal.com]

1. Interesting. What do you mean by his "chick period?" Which books are those? Never heard of any of his books referred to that way.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Rose Madder, etc.

-That- chick period.

Arguably, you could probably try to include Misery, but I don't because it was actually good.

I'm the one who referrs to that particular cycle of his writing as "his chick period," in the hope that some actual scholar will pick up on the term.

[critus.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, ok. The only one of the list I read was Misery. I got out of my Stephen King phase before that cycle really got going, I guess. Was kind of rabid about him for a while. Could stand to go back and read some of them again, too. Good stuff.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

His old stuff is wonderful. His later work. . . not so much.

Stephen King

[sukipot.livejournal.com]

I've read three things: Carrie, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (well, I sort of *had* to, since I loved the movie), and On Writing.

While I never felt motivated to read anything else, I read Carrie when I was about 13 and it bowled me over -- for storytelling, for style, for structure... everything. I still see passages of it in my head from time to time. I don't think of it as a "horror novel" -- just a novel. (I'm struck by the fact that one of the things I like about King is his sense of humor.)

So if I really like Carrie, what should I try next?

Re: Stephen King

[etcet.livejournal.com]

That depends on what it was that appealed to you from what you've read. Since you liked Shawshank, I'd recommend The Green Mile, since that's in the same, more humanistic, style, even though it's another "prison book." The venue is just a convenient way to put the characters in proximity.

If it's the notion of youth struggling (with alienation or just against 'the system'), then "Rage" and "The Long Walk" are very good (both of which appear in "the bachman books," which also includes the original The Running Man, which you may notice loosely resembles the movie that was based on it, as well as one of the worst things the man ever got published, "Roadwork").

You can do far worse than "The Shining" for atmosphere and characterization, and likewise, in that same isolationist motif, "Misery."

If you want to do some heavy lifting with a side of creeped out, then IT is where it's at. For a different, more austere style, the first three/four Dark Tower books are very enjoyable (I include the 4th, while other folks decry it mightily).

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Can't really say I care for Stephen King, but there's a great line attributed to him:

I have the heart of a small boy!
In a jar on my desk.

I like King.....

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

.....when I need something to put me to sleep. I've never had the stamina to finish one of his books. I get bored with it too quickly. I've never understood his allure. After 400 pages of "get the fuck on with it" I start flipping through the latter part of the book looking for a reason to continue. To be fair, I've only tried this with 3 of his works, but that seemed like enough.

I was going to say Sagan/Cosmos - I keep my copy in my truck and bring it along if I have to stop for lunch alone.

[ex-requiella957.livejournal.com]

1 -- Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale was my introduction to Atwood, and ever since I've been hooked. Much of her fiction does a wonderful job of capturing the realities of living a female existence on this planet.

2 -- Milan Kundera
I love the complexity with which he approaches reality. By deconstructing basic human themes and examining them from different angles through his characters, Milan gives the reader an appreciation of the pluralistic nature of reality--there are many different "realities," each of which is constructed within the head of its perceiver.

3 -- Francis Burney
She shocked her contemporaries by imagining a different reality for women; her work had significant impact on later feminist authors. Plus, she knew how to tell a damn good story!