I’ve used the I Write Like analyzer so many times. I always get one of two authors: Chuck Palahniuk or Anne Rice. Always. Never once have I got another author.
And to me, that makes sense.
No, I’m not as good as either of them. I probably never will be. But those are the two biggest influences on my ‘early writing life.’
When I first started writing, I was young. So young that I had just moved out of the ‘read absolutely every single book that came out of this enormous crate of books I got at a yard sale for $10’ stage of my life.
My mom gave birth to me exactly one week before she turned eighteen. She made it her mission in life to make sure that when the snotty parents and teachers at the private school she enrolled me in looked down on her for being a broke twenty-three year old in shorts and cheap shoes, they could say nothing about her parenting. It was important to her that I learned, that I was ahead, that I had what I needed. And what she believed I needed more than anything was an education. Sometimes it worked (I could read before kindergarten). Sometimes it didn’t (despite her attempts to teach me long division – before kindergarten – my eyes still cross when I stare down a math problem).
My mother still to this day brags that I was talking long before any baby she’s ever known (and firmly maintains that she’d never have taught me to speak if she’d realized she’d never be able to teach me to shut up). By the time I was three, I could recite my thin, condensed copy of The Beauty and The Beast verbatim. By four, I’d been doing Hooked on Phonics for (if I remember correctly) two years. By the time she enrolled me in kindergarten, I could read. Not sound out words. I could read.
If it sounds like I’m bragging, it’s because I am. But not on myself.
I’m bragging on my mother. She deserves it.
But once I started reading, there was no going back. It didn’t matter the genre, it didn’t matter the subject. If you put a book in front of me, I was going to read it. Until I turned about twelve. Then I started figuring out what I liked best. And over the next few years, Anne Rice was at the top of the list. So was Chuck Palahniuk. Those were the years I started writing.
Are we all subconsciously influenced by the writers we love, or more specifically, the writers we loved when we discovered we loved writing?
One Honest Word 
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