People Can Be As Interesting As Spaceships

"I haven't finished reading your novel All OR Nothing yet, but I like it very much. I am curious, what novelists did you read that inspired you to write? A reader."

Thanks for the question, reader.

I will say that I have always been a voracious reader, even as a child, and I read many novels growing up. Nevertheless, it wasn't until I read the novel BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER by William Goldman that I seriously considered writing a novel. I was about 15, I think. Yes, 15. I was in ninth grade. After reading that book, I thought, hmmmm, maybe I can do this novel thing.

Why not? I had already written a "novel", sort of, back in seventh grade. It was like 300 hundred pages long, and it involved space ships, sword fights, laser blasters, trolls, dragons, and it was completely episodic and completely derived from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Even I knew that it was awful. I had written it for kicks, I told myself.

That was okay because back then I was writing short stories, which I considered my serious work. As a kid, I loved short story collections, the kind that you could read straight through--this meant science fiction anthologies and sci-fi short story collections (The Martian Chronicles, I Robot, R Is for Rocket, S Is for Space, the Nebula Awards)--my friend Richard and I would call each other and read our favorite stories or the best parts of stories out loud to each other over the phone. My cousin Marcia and I would swap anthologies and then argue over which stories we liked best and why. At night, after homework and Bible study, I would write these ironic-ending short stories and read them to my buddies at lunch the next day. If they laughed at the slapstick or got tricked by the surprising twists or got grossed out by the slick, sickening violence, then I knew I had done a good job. So while I loved reading novels, I had dreams of being a short story writer, not a novelist, back then.

But after Goldman's book, I took out one of the short stories I had completed, Tigger Yum-Yum, erased the childish surprise-ending, added some depth to the characters, and saw in my head how this short story of a post apocalypse boy and his doomed grandfather could grow up to be a novel.

You see, Goldman's book, which I bought at a used bookstore for 50 cents, taught me something.

People, real people, can be as interesting as spaceships.

Problems, real problems, can hold the reader's attention as firmly as the promise of a trick ending.

This is not to say that any of the hundreds of novels I had read prior to Goldman's book had lacked character development or empathy; it is just that when I read that book, I was ready, finally, to notice that it was these elements that I had been reading for all along, beginning with the first "good read" I had had, Charlotte's Web.

Real people, Real problems: this is what I had been reading for even in the science fiction stories I loved, no matter how well disguised they were by the gadgetry, space opera, and pat, ironic endings.

Now, reader, before I get any further off track, let me tell you that the writers who have most influenced me, and perhaps my style, were and still are short story writers beginning with John Cheever, whom I first read during freshman year in college.

Here is a list of other writers who have inspired me and whose collections I usually read straight through and the presence of whose names in the table of contents of anthologies will cause me to purchase said anthology.

T. C. Boyle
John Barth
Ray Bradbury
Alice Munro
Gonzalo Barr (Read him! New on the scene. Excellent!)
Ernest Hemingway
Isaac Asimov
Junot Diaz
Richard Russo
Ray Carver
Leonard Nash (Read him! New on the scene. Excellent!)
Harlan Ellison
J. California Cooper
Joyce Carol Oates
Rick Bass
Laura valeri (Read her! New on the scene. Excellent!)
Ursula K. LeGuin
John Dufresne
Richard Ford
Denis Johnson
Stephen King
Maggie Estep
Lewis Nordan
Tim O’Brien
William Faulkner
Lynne Barrett
Preston L. Allen (Read me! I'm no slouch either!)
Louis Erdrich
Flannery O’Connor
Susan Minot
Sherman Alexie
John Cheever (I just had to say his name twice)
(there are others, I am sure, but my memory is foggy on this, the first day of 2008, so forgive me. I'll add more names to this list when I get the fireflies out of my head. Happy New Year.)


Preston