The Pen He Writes With

In his introduction to the Collected Cheever, Hanif Kureishi talks about John Cheever's work in relation to his influences: they're Chekhovian, since Cheever could also "captur(e) significant moments in ordinary lives with humorous comparison and without condescension, and...write a breathtaking elegiac last paragraph that both encompasses and transcends the story", as well as taking from Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Kureishi's novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, in turn takes after Cheever, being set in the suburbs (South London rather than the South Shore) and dealing with sexuality.

It seems to me, then, that a writer's style is like a tree; cut it down, and you can see all the influencing factors like rings on the stump. My own voice has a similar form of ancestry. Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Douglas Adams taught me to stop being a miserable git and notice the beauty in the world. From Alan Moore, David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino comes a fondness for wordplay and dialogue. My love of sarcasm with a note of burning righteousness can be traced back to Warren Ellis by way of Hunter S. Thompson.

And, much like how no two trees or two people are the same, however similar styles may be, no two authorial voices are the same either.

Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. - Henry David Thoreau