Five books that taught me how to write
Odes to influences
Personally, I think Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory of writers is bogus. Writers aren’t anxiously trying to be as different as possible from their predecessors. Perhaps their contemporaries, but not their predecessors. In fact, I think writers more than anything want to be like their influences from the past.
Whatever anxiety there is comes from how you’re inevitably found wanting. The upside is this makes it easy to compile a list of your greatest influences—they are simply the ones against whom your own work feels the smallest. So here are five books that influenced my writing, in that I am constantly measuring myself against them, and failing. In the modern parlance of artificial intelligence, they are some of the high-quality parts of my “training set,” as it were. In the modern world of newsletters and journalism articles, writing all sounds the same—here are some people with actual style.