Winding Me Up!
I’ve finally found the writer who has convinced me to change my own writing style. His name is Haruki Murakami.
In the past, I aped other writers and always found myself struggling in my imitations - which is deserved since I hadn't an original idea in my head. Kafka’s prose is too pure, Mann’s too polemic, Nabokov’s too genius for availability, Amis’s too fooled into thinking he’s Nabokov. Thomas Pynchon wrote only two pieces that were digestible (“Entropy” and The Crying of Lot 49), the rest is a game where there are no winners. Fitzgerald is poetic but he lost it with too many pedestrian characters. Overexcited translators make me question Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev. Ionesco and Pinter are playwrights. Simplifications aside, I’ve learned from them all. But nothing has made me completely re-think the way I choose to write.
My first was to blame. The short story writer Saki. It’s all so clever. It made me sick. I, too, then had to be clever. I make me sick.
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