💬 Weekly Question: What novelist did you learn the most about writing from reading?

Weekly questions’ comment sections are left open for one week. This thread is now locked.

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5AM StoryTalk’s art question this week is primarily aimed at writers — meaning, individuals who find themselves compelled enough to write that they’ve actually put effort into improving this skill and even developing their own “voice” as one. If you have a Substack, for example, this number includes you. Here goes:

What novelist did you learn the most about writing just from reading?

Reading is the surest way to learn how to write. We pick up bits and pieces from every book, short story, comic book, and article we read over the years. Over time, these tidbits accumulate into something like a style, a voice, a way of crafting prose ourselves. But okay, that all said, there’s almost always an author or two, typically a novelist, whose word choices, whose sentences, whose paragraphs showed you what, in a sense, great writing was and, in your ongoing obsession with their work, laid a solid foundation for you to build on over the years. You probably even started off writing by emulating them.

For me, that author is J.D. Salinger. While I’m horrified by the despicable man he’s been revealed to be over the years, his novel and short story collections The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction taught me so much about the act of writing. Not reading, writing. I recently reread Franny and Zooey again, and was struck by how I still can be made to gasp at how perfectly his descriptions land and how something like grace seems to manifest when you least expect it while reading. This isn’t to say that Salinger is my favorite author. But he is the foundation, the first author I began to emulate, the one whose work I spent the longest time trying to creatively untangle myself from so I could focus more on forging a more unique voice of my own.

Now, your turn to answer…and don’t forget to read and weigh in on others’ answers!

Source: Annie Spratt