If books were a coat of paint, my childhood would have been washed in white. Save for a handful of Pultizer Prize-winning books penned by brilliant Black women, the writers I devoured in the first two decades of my life were white men. Forever drunk, fornicating, and foiled by their folly Russian men, English cravat-wearing men, American bullfighting, conflicted and forlorn, scotch-swiveling men — it wasn’t until I was twenty-four and in graduate school did my world crack wide open.
Although my Columbia MFA experience was a massacre, the four graduate-level English classes I took each semester not only expanded my purview, but they made me a better writer. Back then, I didn’t have a voice. I knew I wasn’t interested in writing linear stories, I cleaved to all things dark, and I was fixated on the arrangement of words in a sentence. But a voice? A style? PFFT. I was too busy discovering a whole genre of experimental literary fiction and diagramming sentences than owning a style.
I craved Joan Didion’s whitespace, Zadie Smith’s deceptively easy, languid rhythm, Amy Hempel’s line artistry, Don Delillo’s narrative interruptions. When I got serious about telling stories, writers were clothes I’d try on for size. Few fit. I lacked their confidence and prowess, and it was only when I read, studied, deconstructed, wrote, edited, cried over the bad bad bad writing, did I get good.
You learn by dissecting the books you love. You ferret out the magic. You read the dialogue aloud to get accustomed to its cadence and rhythm. You outline the plot and structure to understand pacing and logic. You vivisect images until you see the world through a kaleidoscope where everything has multiple levels and meanings, which shift depending upon your view.
Books are shape-shifters, saviors, companions, and teachers. I’m not here to drop the plots of the books I loved, but to demonstrate how wildly different authors can inform and help refine one’s style and voice.
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