'Foundational' Authors

Authors who have shaped my writing as a child and beyond.

Rania, London, June 17th.

Writing, like any other skill, is dynamic and ever-changing—it transforms as you, yourself, change as a person. It grows with you; it has ‘phases’, either of productivity or captivation. Personally, though, I believe there are a few authors whose works have become the skeleton to the beast that is my writing and reading preferences (unfortunately not because they’re badass, but because I have yet to learn to tame them).

I chose these authors simply based on this question: ‘Had I read another book in the same time period, would I have adopted a different writing style?’ 

And the answer for all of them is: yes! If I had spent my formative years in the company of other pieces of writing, I think my own would have taken on an entirely different journey.

Sri Izzati: The Foundations

(picture cr: Gramedia)

I can’t talk about my formative years of reading and writing without mentioning one of my favourite childhood (and all-time) authors. While searching the web for images of her book to use in this article, I was surprised by how vividly memories of her books came back to me as soon as I saw the covers again despite not having held one in my hands in many, many years. I felt like it was only yesterday that I was swept away into Amie’s cookie shop-house and shed tears when Lyn threw her precious baked goods to the floor. I was immediately taken back to the long nights when I’d pretend I was one of the girls in Rainesthood, or fervently reading the tension between the twins with opposing personalities in 2 of Me. I’m fascinated by this even as I’m writing—while there are plot points that I immediately associate with these books, what came back to me in full force were the emotions instead—that’s how you know they were masterpieces.

Her books are special for a lot of things. For one, they shaped not only my writing, but my love for literature as well—and, for a time, propped up that dream of being a published author, too, as a young Indonesian girl. Moreover, despite being children’s books written by a girl who was, at the time, no older than a pre-teen, they were astoundingly profound in message. Her characters did not only have depth of personality, but were also varied in circumstance. I’m not exaggerating when I say Let’s Go Fatimah was probably the earliest literary work to introduce me to class disparity, struggles of poverty and the frailness of wealth that may turn your luck around when you least expect it. 

I think what had made them so timeless that I remember them so vividly to this day were how unapologetically innocent they were. Her novels are exemplary of storytelling in its purest form—there is build-up, conflict, and resolution, but there are also lessons to take away, lovable characters to remember by and descriptions that excite the scope of one’s imagination, both big and small.

Not long after I moved to Doha and was sadly separated, for a long time, from access to Indonesian fiction. I’m glad hers were one of the last few books I could carry with me, though it was largely in memory.

Lemony Snicket: Tone

(picture cr: pinterest)

I have no recollection of my first encounter with A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I wish I did because if I were to have descendants in the future, I’d like to put them through the exact same circumstances and experience the same life-changing literary epiphany. The second volume was the earliest novel I read as soon as I moved to Doha and understood enough English to get by (even earlier than my Enid Blyton phase… admittedly I was very late to catch onto that). It wasn’t until I was in Year 5 or 6 that I got properly hooked on it, though. I remember waiting impatiently for Virgin Megastore in Qatar to stock the last volume, The End, and snagging the first hard-cover copy I could find. I didn’t stop there—I was slightly obsessed with the series for years to come, re-reading all 13 volumes, keeping them lined up on the shelves like some kind of heirloom and buying the accompaniment books such as The Beatrice Letters as soon as I had access to Amazon. 

Looking back, this series truly shaped my tone of writing well into my late-teens. Only now do I realise, with slight alarm, that a large part of my obsession stemmed from the craving of a fictional feeling of despair and helplessness borne from the consistent lack of answers and persistently unresolved mystery that are so distinctive to this series. Although Snicket’s books are classified as ‘children’s novels’, they’re incredibly dark both thematically and stylistically. Even the occasional humour carries a constant undercurrent of pessimism, gloom and impending doom, and whatever happy moments the novels had were merely precursors to even cataclysmic tragedies. When I started writing seriously in my pre-teen years, I tried to emulate the same atmosphere in my writing—despair, doom, gloom, but with a hint of wit when I had enough sense to think of jokes. I also had an acute penchant for unhappy endings no matter how unsatisfying it was on the reader’s part. I mean, isn’t there a sort of… satisfaction? To being left unsatisfied?

Markus Zusak: Style

(picture cr: Amazon)

The Book Thief remains the only book of Zusak’s I’ve ever read (I’m sorry…) but to this day, I still have yet to shake off the after-effects of absorbing his contagious style of writing. Some people might disagree when I say it’s purple prose, but it’s definitely not conventional style of writing. This book wasn’t my first foray into purple prose, but it definitely left the biggest impression because while I was re-reading some of my past stuff to remember where exactly I drew my inspiration from, I didn’t even have to think about where I derived my teenage-years ‘default’ style from.

Here’s an excerpt I randomly took out of a prose piece I wrote in 2014, back when I was 15*:

"Bony fingers claw at his arm and X holds back his own scream as nails dig painfully into his skin, almost drawing blood, because this is nothing compared to what Y is feeling. He tries to find the words–three, to be exact–anything, to put Y at ease, because he knows that while words can impale someone like a sword, it is also the strongest antidote the Earth proffers.

But comforting someone is a hard task, even with all the words in the world. It is nearly an impossible feat to do so with three.”

And this is an excerpt from Zusak’s The Book Thief:

“She would wake up swimming in her bed, screaming, and drowning in the flood of sheets. On the other side of the room, the bed that was meant for her brother floated boatlike in the darkness. Slowly, with the arrival of consciousness, it sank, seemingly into the floor. This vision didnt help matters, and it would usually be quite a while before the screaming stopped.

Possibly the only good to come out of these nightmares was that it brought Hans Hubermann, her new papa, into the room, to soothe her, to love her.”

—Chapter: The Woman With The Iron Fist

Like??? WHAT??? I basically lifted his entire flow and sentence structures. I am also still guilty of having a long-ish paragraph, made up of sentences of various lengths which describe the actions and thoughts that happen presently, followed by a heart-wrenching line or two that encompasses a more general message, but with emotional scrutiny—almost like stepping back from the immediate narrative, with a side of heartbreak. 

Perhaps I especially liked this punch-in-the-gut feeling that this specific structure is meant to evoke, or perhaps I was fascinated by the glorification of sadness that many coin today as ‘angst’. Whatever it was… it worked. I was a mini carbon copy of Zusak for much of my pre-teen years, gripping this style of writing as hard as one would a rollercoaster ride’s safety handles. I’ve grown a little out of the purple-prose style in recent years—which I think is more to do with my depleted brainpower and attention span rather than literary maturity—but this light purple-prose type of style is something I find myself often falling back on.

*PS: I know this is only one (1) excerpt from the book and my writing both, but I can positively say that they both have the same style throughout.

Rick Riordan: Characters and Setting

(picture cr: ofscriptedshadows)

Must I elaborate? The OG, the man who educated me in the ways of ancient mythologies… and also the author who taught me the most about character and setting in a piece of writing.

I think the Percy Jackson books were the first novels in a young-adult series I religiously followed (I never properly read the Harry Potter novels past the third book). This was a period of time when I started to consider things beyond the overarching technicalities of writing and delved deeper into the more personal factors to characters. For example, their dynamics with other characters, their motivations (that may or may not be instrumental to the overall plot) and, especially in a series, their trajectory and development. Unlike other YA novels I read later, none of Riordan’s characters ever annoyed me—their motivations were all in place, and even when they were in the wrong place you understood how they got there. 

The ‘setting’ that I refer to here isn’t the Tolkien-esque world-building type of thing, bu the circumstances the characters find themselves in. Are they in our normal world? Our normal world with a twist? Are they space-people, trying to survive in a completely different century? What I mean is, Riordan didn’t show me how to build a world from scratch, to describe grand settings, nor how to create an entirely new universe with rules and how to preserve all those rules in longer pieces of writing. I did, however, learn how to guide characters through their world in a way that enriches themselves and the setting all at once from his books, and the importance of continuity in an ongoing series.

That’s all from me! Do you have books or pieces of literature that you personally consider ‘foundational’? Which authors have shaped your writing or literary preferences? I’d love to hear about them!