Ancestors of style

Finding a voice as an author isn’t easy. How formal are you going to be? Academic style? Objective third person narrator, authority laden and confident? Are you going to be present as a person? And then, what form are you going to write? Poetry? Non-fiction? Fantasy? Literature? Conventional wisdom will tell you that to make it as an author you have to do one thing (usually a rather narrow thing) and stick to it so that readers know what to expect. That never felt comfortable to me. I get bored too easily.

I’ve been working on trying to find my own voice for a lot of years, but ended up tending to have different voices for different jobs, not one, coherent sort of me. However, there are two authors who have been increasingly influential when it comes to how I’ve developed on the style front: Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. If you aren’t familiar with them, I heartily recommend checking out their books. Both are of a pagan persuasion, and both are awesome.

There are a number of things about their work that hold true for both chaps, so I’m going to talk about them collectively. Both Kevan and Robin mix things up in a way that conventional wisdom has it, you shouldn’t. Books of poetry that also are about poetry. Mixing the academic and the experiential, the personal and the objective. They range widely, both writing fiction and non-fiction work – Robin’s fiction tends more towards the story telling. Kevan writes adult and YA. Their books aren’t easy to pigeon hole because they ignore where convention sets the boundaries, so that the intensely personal can sit alongside deep literary analysis, and other wonderful juxtapositions. Both men write with humour, and expose their thoughts and feelings in a way that I find utterly compelling. Last but not least, neither seems averse to irritating the hell out of people! If they feel or think something, neither tends to pull any punches with the delivery.

I don’t want to write academic style books. It’s not a style that comes easily to me and I think it puts off more people than it turns on. I also don’t want to write fluffy, lightweight content. I’ve learned through this blog and other teaching work that writing from personal experience is the strongest way to go. I’ve learned to work with my own doubt. In terms of how I present my thoughts to the world, the two writers I am especially keen to emulate, would be Kevan and Robin. Both in terms of the diversity of work, and the tones they strike. I want that blend of intimate, erudite, playful and confident. I have a LOT of reading to do if I mean to get anywhere near either of them for eruditeness… erudicity…. Eruditude…? It’s good to have something to aspire to, though.

So, picking through influences on current work, I thought of Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. There are a lot of people who have influenced what I do, over the years, but no one else I have set out quite so deliberately to follow. I think both of them have a great deal of style, and not only in their writing. It may be a bit much calling them ‘ancestors’ though, because neither is that much older than me. Although that’s one of the great joys in picking your ancestors of tradition… anyone is fair game!