Sean Lovelace—
What book made you want to write? What book made you want to quit writing?
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Meta
Bunnicula. James and the Giant Peach. (no book has made me want to stop writing, except maybe “Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents”)
1. Lizard Music, the Dragonlance series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Kafka’s “The Burrow” (short story, not a book).2. None. Why does there have to be a book that makes me want to stop writing? If there is such a book, I haven’t read it yet.
Nick: I remember Bunnicula!
The Fountainhead. Leo Tolstoy.
ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD/NA
Same answer to both: slaughterhouse five, Vonnegut.
Goodnight Moon (the hockey sweater too maybe) / Moby Dick
Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest
Black Sabbath – “War Pigs”
Pierre Bourdieu – La Distinction [did not finish]
The book that first made me want to write was Brideshead Revisited.
The book that keeps me wanting to write is The Secret History.
Paula Danziger’s The Pistachio Prescription / none thus far
I always liked to write, but Amy Hempel’s short stories made me take writing seriously. Her prose is technically brilliant, and perfectly constructed at the sentence level. Also, she has this way of making ordinary events break your heart.
I am currently reading Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. It’s the most depressing piece of literature I’ve ever come across. Plath makes everything you do seem pointless. I can hear her cold, distant voice in my head, analyzing everything I do. She has said nearly everything that could be said about humans in that book. I’m not sure if I’ll ever write again.
This is out of context, but Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is the book that made me want to live.
Bunnicula. James and the Giant Peach. (no book has made me want to stop writing, except maybe “Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents”)
1. Lizard Music, the Dragonlance series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Kafka’s “The Burrow” (short story, not a book).
2. None. Why does there have to be a book that makes me want to stop writing? If there is such a book, I haven’t read it yet.
Nick: I remember Bunnicula!
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy made me want to give up, surrender. But when I read China Mieville I get excited about crafting worlds again.
I wanted to write before I could read because my dad made it seem really cool. Later I just really loved fantasy and SF novels. Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions, helped me want it for my own reasons.
Nothing makes me want to quit writing except for other writers.
1. The last few pages of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because they are journal entries, they are idiosyncratic, they are hints, sketches, and they are pivotal in Stephen’s evolution, a moving into something else, a becoming.
2. None.
Bauhaus (the band, not the movement), I remember, when I was in High School, was one of those phenomena that made me want to take writing really seriously. I thought (at the time): this guy (Peter Murphy) is so amazingly serious, bold, he exposes himself utterly, as if he didn’t have an audience: art is everything to him, he would allow it to swallow him up if it came to that . . . so I decided that I would let art swallow me up. Robert Smith (The Cure) had a similar affect on me . . . except with The Cure it wasn’t so much about boldness but more the idea that it was okay to spill your blood all over other people’s floors, that art could be cathartic and really moving / interesting at the same time.
Kafka was the first true influence, though, and I think the biggest & most important; he gave me a new language, one that I understood fully and immediately even though I was unaware that such a language could even exist. He gave me access to an awful lot of stuff that I don’t think I’d realized, until then, was packed up inside of me.
David Lynch, too, I think, was significant to an extent.
To write: Guiness Book of World Records
To quit: C by Tom McCarthy (I finished reading it last night, and if this is what passes for innovative, for avante-garde, for the next step in fiction, with it’s prose that reads exactly like a screenplay, then I give up, because apparently, so has everybody else.
are you a goth
Thumbs up on the Hempel thoughts.
Have to say Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. I’d been writing years before reading that book in highschool, but that book made me _want_ to write.
Still haven’t really read a book that made me want to stop writing. Usually, if I read something incredible, it makes me want to write. I think it’s a strange reaction for a writer to read a mindblowing book and be discouraged rather than inspired.
Not sure how people will take to my confession but…
House of Leaves.
It was the one novel that made me realize there were so many possibilities as-of-yet unexplored in literature.
Bad Behavior. Lolita.
Calvin and Hobbes made me want to write. Cormac makes me want to quit.
Write: Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five.
Quit: the first fifty pages of Underworld and the nonfiction / essays of DFW.
No.
To write: Guiness Book of World Records
To quit: C by Tom McCarthy (I finished reading it last night, and if this is what passes for innovative, for avante-garde, for the next step in fiction, with it’s prose that reads exactly like a screenplay, then I give up, because apparently, so has everybody else.
FOR ME JPFACTO IT WAS THE OTHER WAY AROUND. ESPECIALLY AFTER THE SWEATER MOVIE CAME OUT.
“PORTRAIT” IS A REALLY GOOD ONE MIMI. ZZZZZIPP WENT INTO IT THINKING THAT IT WOULD A BOOK THAT WOULD MAKE ZZZZIPP WANT TO QUIT, BUT IT IS NOT THAT KIND OF BOOK AT ALL.
not a book: Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”
and ain’t nuthin gon stop me
The first: ‘The Outsiders,’ by SE Hinton, followed, by “The Metamorphosis,” by Kafka. Later, and still: ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,’ by Ray Carver, to both.
he does seem mad goth
or like “black metal”
my original comment went to the black hole of spam i guess.
here it is again, sans link:
last of the really great whangdoodles.
I barely understood ten pages of that book when I read it for a class back in my second year, and yet I somehow managed to write two A+ papers on it. The academy is strange.
Reading Cortazar right now. He’s certainly got the magic.
that’s the book that made me write too, i read it when i was 13 and started writing a stream of consciousness story while i was still reading it, it influenced me so deeply it’s impossible to even say what it means to me
no book has made me want to stop, if it’s really good i just want to rip it off
the black metal jonathan franzen
Heh.
Not a metalhead, either.
Honestly, I’m much more into the shoegaze stuff.
Also, I don’t dress up. Or wear eyeliner.
Sure, I admit it: I have black hair. Well… the black is growing out, now.
…But enough about me?
Cronopios and Famas.
Bill Watterson never really belonged on the comics page. I always admired not only his technical skill but also the compositional sensibility he showed in his Sunday strips.
It’s weird that of the four Calvin & Hobbes books I owned back in grade school, I only had two of them left in college (where the others disappeared to, I’ve no idea), and now I don’t know where any of them are.
The Amazing Vanishing Calvin & Hobbes.
Travels with Charlie- Steinbeck, Letters to a Young Poet -Rilke
rey-rey, sweet
13! you are so precocious
zippy, hi
i think what i love so much about “Portrait” is that it is Personal
Ha. I was just about to type, “Dude, yes! Travels With Charlie!” and then thought, “Oh. Hey, Laura.”
Either Scions of Shannara, something from the Redwall Series, or The Eye of the World. Probably more than all of those: Magic the Gathering (put the decks together like pages).
No book has made me want to quit yet. I see this as a bad thing, mostly; are none of the things magic enough, or am I too null? Either way it makes me want to both keep writing and stop.
I am a physics grad student. I still make mistakes while drawing ray diagrams (in Optics). It’s so easy to fool the system.
I know that feeling. I imitate other writers’ styles so often, I think I’m beginning to lose mine.
Carver is strange. When I first read that book, I fell in love with his voice and tried to imitate him. The second time I read it, I decided to have nothing to do with that style. Ever.
I have been oscillating between those two extremes ever since. Carver does that to me. Makes me all fickle.
The book that made me want to start writing; All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland.
The book that made me want to stop writing; The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, when I realised I could never write anything that good.
Want: The Secret Goldfish, David Means.
Not Want: The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty.
I wanted to write before I could read because my dad made it seem really cool. Later I just really loved fantasy and SF novels. Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions, helped me want it for my own reasons.
Nothing makes me want to quit writing except for other writers.