Creative Family Tree
Who are your literary forebears?
The Oglala Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk (1863–1950) taught that humanity is fundamentally interconnected with all creation, and that we are united by a Great Spirit that lives within every aspect of the natural world—people, animals, the waters, and the green.
Whether we recognize it or not, writers are also interconnected with other writers, our living peers and those who came before. Every writer is first a reader, and then becomes a reader inspired to emulation. We each have a unique, unreproducible voice, but we are also part of a stream of writers that includes authors we have read and many we have not, but whose work shaped our culture and ways of writing, and showed what was possible in our creative world.
Where do you fit in this long storytelling tradition? Just for fun, trace your writing lineage along whatever branches you choose – writers in your genre, writers who look like you, writers who have a similar background. Imagine yourself as one part of this great whole and feel their work inside you as well.
When I consider the writers who inspired me to become a writer or leant something to my POV or tone of voice, a few names come to mind:
Alex Raymond
Charles Schulz
Franz Kafka
Max Frisch
Ethan Mordden
Marge Piercy
Patricia Highsmith
John Irving
Sylvia Plath
That may seem a disjointed – and possibly unhinged – collection of writers, but each of them left a mark, from my love of epic fiction to my bent towards melancholy and empathy for characters for whom life never quite seems to work out. They helped me explore questions of identity, sexuality, violence, and politics, and influenced my habit of (mostly) true confession.
There are others – John Preston, Andre Gide, Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood, too many poets to name – but those who made the list either are a special influence or were simply the first of their type to enter my world. There are others I wish I could name – Ray Bradbury, John Waters, Kurt Vonnegut – but as much as I love them, I can’t hear their echoes in my voice.
Whom do you consider part of your writer’s family tree? Do you extend off a single branch or were you – like me – cross-pollinated from multiple sources?
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