#and yes ​I am still calling for a Little Dorrit AU

[bensoloshrugged]

Victorian Reylo AU

[abeautifulblog]

you are honestly my favorite fanfiction author of all time, and it feels sort of back-handed in a weird inexplicable way to have "fanfiction" preface that... in my very humble opinion, if was to list my favorite (no preface) authors of all time, you'd definitely be in my top three; beaten only by Mitch Albom and Scott F. Fitzgerald for me, and youre steadfast one of the main authors I re/read for inspiration when i write... who are the authors that inspire you most??

O wow! That is – some high praise indeed, I am deeply honored. :) It’s gratifying to hear that this fic is resonating with you, because it is the most personal piece of fiction I’ve ever written. (Honestly, I’d be happy not to write anything this personal ever again.)

As for the authors who have influenced me (strap in)…

One of the most influential writers when I was a teenager was Anne Rice and her vampire series, though I think it was less about the vampire thing and more about the raging homoeroticism (I joke that Anne Rice made me gay) and the intense, almost claustrophobic emotional intensity of those books. I’ve actually written about her influence on my writing here. (I don’t update that blog anymore, I don’t even know how to approve/respond to comments anymore, but it’s got a pretty extensive archive for people who like hearing me talk about media.)

It’s interesting because just recently (like, last week) I reread a few of her earlier books – Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, and I’m about halfway through Tale of the Body Thief – and was reminded that yes, she was in fact really good before she went off the rails. (After Tale of the Body Thief, the rest of the series is nigh-unreadable.) She writes lonely people really well – the struggle of endlessly trying to achieve intimacy and failing. When I’m on my game and writing powerful emotional content, I feel like my style owes a lot to the way she does descriptions, which is… kind of hard to describe, but it’s like… emotive language in unexpected combinations? Pairing descriptions of the landscape with adjectives that tie in to the character’s emotional state, or abstract nouns with adjectives that describe a physical sensation. I don’t know, I don’t have any specific examples I can give, but I’ll catch myself writing sometimes and go “ooh that’s good” followed by “haha, you’re pulling an Anne Rice.”

Besides Anne Rice, most of what I read is sci-fi/fantasy; I tend to have very little use for realistic/literary fiction. (Which is why it’s kind of funny that I’m 70k and counting into a suburban love story.) I like SFF, and I like it gay, and for many years it was my quest to find and read every book in the intersection of that particular Venn diagram – the fruits of my quest are here, The Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn’t Suck. Anything with a throbbing “top pick” icon next to it is, well, exactly that, but I’m not sure whether I’d call them an influence, because I was already in my twenties by the time I read them, so my literary style was kind of settled by then.

(Although when I need to read something to ~get me in the mood~ for writing, Karin Lowachee, Jacqueline Carey, and Sarah Monette are excellent choices for top-notch prose and top-notch emotional engagement.)

Someone who’s not on that list is a relatively obscure manga writer named Miyamoto Kano, who I really wish I could rec to a wider audience, but her work is mostly inaccessible if you don’t read Japanese. Her stories have been a very strong influence on the way I write romance, namely that in the real world, sex doesn’t actually resolve anything (except sexual tension, I guess), and it is not where you should be investing your narrative tension. I’m much more a fan of letting characters jump into bed with each other before they’ve finished working out their shit, and not making the resolution of the drama hinge on them having sex.

(…Which, again, funny – because we’re 70k into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and they still haven’t shagged, which means I’m writing exactly what I say I don’t write.)

I’m also a huge fan of Miyamoto’s brand of off-beat realism, that you’ll get these moments of comic absurdity popping up even at the most dire moments because that’s what life is. The universe has no respect for your personal crisis, and you get weird/funny/distracting shit popping up when you’re just trying to have a good cry, or a good solid screaming match. To reiterate my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: “Life doesn’t cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” Miyamoto gets that, so beautifully.

And I’m probably forgetting something, but those are the strongest fiction influences I can think of. I read a lot of nonfiction too in order to understand people better on both an individual and a societal level – my top picks would be Influence (Cialdini), Whipping Girl (Serrano), Made to Stick (Heath), On Killing (Grossman), Stigma (Goffman), Collapse (Diamond). (With a much longer list of specialty books for specific subjects.)

For learning how to write emotional involvement, I am a serious nerd for narratology and I recommend Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds. It’s not a book on how to write, it’s one that documents the different methods for conveying a character’s consciousness to a reader. I read it for my thesis, but it wound up being an epiphany, because it explained exactly why some books achieve so much more emotional engagement than others.

And lastly, because it would be ungenerous not to give a shout-out to the very excellent fanfics that are no doubt feeding into my own writing in some way, here’s a sampling of some lesser-known favorites:

Ain’t No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) - Steve/Bucky, with a very different take on Bucky than what you usually see. I guess maybe this one isn’t so unknown anymore, but I FOUND IT BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR.

Odi et Amo - Eagle of the Ninth, aka, that movie set in Roman Britain where Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell were being hella gay at each other. This fic is a Dead Poets Society fusion, beautifully atmospheric, makes you wish you knew more about poetry.

Love Is All You Need To Destroy Your Enemies - Dresden Files/Welcome to Night Vale crossover. So good that I don’t even begrudge it having dethroned my own Dresden fic from being top-in-fandom.

World Ain’t Ready - Les Miz high school AU. You don’t need to know anything about Les Miz to enjoy this; I didn’t! :D

In His Image - Supernatural, Dean/Castiel. There are a number of fics that are reworkings of season 5, but this one is brilliant. Like when you’re all of a page into the first chapter of a fic and you can feel a smile starting to spread across your face because, oh, oh, this writer is GONNA BE GOOD.

If You Liked The Book, You’ll Hate The Movie - X-Men: First Class, another high school AU because why not. I have a weakness for weird, dysfunctional people being weird and dysfunctional.

…And that does not even scratch the surface of the fics I’ve read and enjoyed, but yeah.

I should stop now. Thank you for reading this far.