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What Author Do You Wish You Could Write Like?
When you think of all the authors you’ve read, who stands out the most to you as someone you would want to emulate in your own writing? I know we all want to write with our own unique style and bring something new to the world, but most of us have our favorites—those writers who inspire us.
While I have favorite authors across all genres, there are only a few I would like to emulate in style and expression. The one at the top of the list might surprise you. You might think I’d want to write like Ayn Rand or even Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (for those who know me), but the one author I’ve always adored is E. B. White.
White’s simplicity, purity, and sense of wonder captivate me. His style, technical skills, and ideas are in perfect harmony. Every word he chooses rings with a clarity of emotion that pulls you into his world. Reading White is like taking a swim in a cool river on a cloudless summer day.
White once wrote, “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
This is beauty to me, and it’s why I love E. B. White. One of my goals in my writing is to express not only my thoughts, but my heart — to connect with others through my words, to fill the page with passion and wonder. In that sense, White is a kindred spirit.
If you could write like any author, who would it be?
Published in General
First I need to find my own voice as a writer, but C.S. Lewis most impresses me. He sweeps through a variety of genres with ease, brings intellectual and academic heft, and can translate lofty concepts into easily understood prose.
I agree that E. B. White is the master of simplicity The Elements of Style is still a must have for any author.
Commentary – Jonah Goldberg and P. J. O’Rourke use wit so effectively.
Fiction – Dan Silva and Bernard Cornwall characters keep you captivated
However if I thought I could write plays, George S. Kaufman is the person I most admire and he was smart enough to collaborate with some of the best writers of his time.
For prose – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
For poetry – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
G.K. Chesterton. George Orwell. Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal. All British, all brilliant.
I would like to be able to write fiction like Robert A. Heinlein. His gift was his ability to make you see the world he was depicting and visualize the characters in his stories without diving into great expository paragraphs describing everything in detail. His early novels flowed like water, yet I felt like I could visualize every scene and every person in them. He knew how to describe the essence of a place such that you just absorbed it through osmosis. He was the anti-Brett Easton Ellis.
For non-fiction, I’d love to be able to write like P.J. O’Rourke. Being able to balance gut-busting hilarity with deadly-serious commentary is a rare gift. Jonah Goldberg can straddle that fence pretty well, as can Mark Steyn. But P.J. is the master. Or was, in his younger years.
For outright humor, Dave Barry has no equal in my book.
On the subject of E.B. White, whenever discussing “Great American Novels,” I always mention “Charlotte’s Web.” Sure, it’s a book for children, but it is also distinctly American. And so very well written.
Let’s see… In no particular order:
I’m sure I have left out several others. I’d add Nabokov, only I think I’d scare myself if I wrote like Nabokov. Likewise if I wrote like Richard Epstein.
Willa Cather: “The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts, who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on.”
Marilynne Robinson: “Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced.”
P. G. Wodehouse: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
C. S. Lewis: On growing up in a house of books: “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”
For a pure action scene: the late, great Vince Flynn.
Amen on Scruton. One of conservatism’s and Western culture’s great men. I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of his writing, but the man can flat-out write.
Hitchens.
If I could magically possess the writing abilities of any one author, I would ask for GK Chesterton.
I know at least one Chesterton hater who says I already do write like him: “inasmuch as his writing was unintelligible and extremely boring, you may as well already be GK.” Well, I wouldn’t mind having his wit and insight and creativity, too!
Ryan: Anyone who can say that GKC or you are unintelligible or boring is barbarian. If Nanda were anywhere near this person, he or she would be in serious danger (and that’s in danger from the nicest person on Ricochet).
Billy set the sardines carefully beside him. He could smell the thing in the damp. It stood there inside the door with the rain falling in the weeds and gravel behind it and it was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists. It stood and then it shook itself in its grotesque fashion and hobbled moaning to the far corner of the room where it looked back and then turned three times and lay down.
Cormac McCarthy The Crossing
God is the primary interlocutor, who not only himself comes to meet the other speaker but who also creates the other and who does not cease to recreate him or her by calling to him or her in the void.
Indeed, this theme of the Word which not only saves but also creates by its own power, which saves only by recreating, is above all, to use the phrase of the prophet, “what has never arisen in the heart of man, but what God has revealed to us . . .”
Louis Bouyer Introduction to the Spiritual Life
For me, a cross between Umberto Eco and Neal Stephenson.
For me it would be Hemmingway, Kipling, and an old history professor of mine Richard Mackenney.
By which I meant David Friedman, of course. (My edit function is busted.)
Couldn’t agree more. Chandler’s plots don’t always make sense, but I believe there is no writer, anywhere, anytime, who was better at detonating his vision of the world in the reader’s consciousness. I find his descriptions so evocative they’re uncanny. Here’s one from The High Window, just a quick off-the-cuff rundown of a policeman Marlow meets:
“Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.”
Mercy. That sentence — in its word choice, its pacing, its pushing the envelope of grammar and punctuation to remarkable effect — is perfection.
Others have beaten me to Twain, Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and CS Lewis.
Let me add John Buchan (has anyone put more action and suspense in a tighter package than The Thirty Nine Steps?) and Alan Moorehead.
I like Bill Bryson and Stephen Ambrose for the ability to tell a compelling story. I like the humor and bite of O’Rourke and our own Jonah G, but am fond of Greg Gutfeld (who refers to tyrant acolytes like Sean Penn and Oliver Stone as “Dictator Tots”). As a technical writer, I like James McPherson’s civil war writing for setting out facts by weaving yarn, not piling up sticks. I wish I could explain and defend my faith like Phillip Yancey and Tim Kelleher. And as someone who loved telling stories to kids, I love the warmth and silliness of Louis Sachar and Jon Scieszka.
For fiction, Asimov and Heinlein. For commentary and essays, Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer. For political writing that is clear,concise, lasting, and persuasive, Abraham Lincoln.
Two writers: Dave Barry and Ernest Hemingway, Dave Barry because he makes me laugh, Hemingway because he writes without adjectives and adverbs.
(Wait, was that a sentence?)
Like Which Author Do You Wish You Could Write?
Anne Tyler, CS Lewis, Wallace Stegner, Jane Austen.
I think there are men’s writers and women’s writers and some who cross the divide. Cormack McCarthy is the consummate man’s writer. I admire his writing but somehow never want to finish a book. Anne Tyler and Jane Austen are the consummate women’s writers, though it is not unmanly to like them. C.S. Lewis is a writer for everybody, both in wisdom and style.
Patrick McManus
No question, Robertson Davies.
I have too many “favorites”, like whom I should like to be able to write. But, at the top of the list is Rudyard Kipling. He can create a world in an opening sentence.
I have my genre favorites. For short stories, Raymond Carver was an amazing craftsman. He used a very limited, third person style, nearly impossible to copy. For essays, Thomas Sowell. Who else is able to explain such difficult economic concepts so easily and succinctly? For pure fiction prose: John Updike. He was the John Wyeth of 2oth century fiction. For non-fiction (and fiction): Tom Wolfe. His stuff is pure energy
According to “I Write Like”, I do write like Nabokov, sometimes. Huh.
Huh. I gave that a shot, just rattling off a few paragraphs spontaneously, and it said I write like Stephen King.