#thank u for sending this in holly ilysm ur presence is always lovely!!!!

[batwngs-archive]

i am back again because i love you and i love ur thoughts and opinions. SO what or who are some of your biggest influences on your writing? and 😌 favorite book, story, poem, anything!

miss holly blessing my existence and my tiny lil corner yet again🤧💕

a lot of my influences really come from like movies, music, and poems bc I consume those the more frequently and more often! I kinda just try to get some vibe from movies/poems/prompts/etc. and run with that but music helps in the crafting/writing stage as I mostly improvise with my writing (which is like. what I mostly do) sometimes even pictures (literal photographs and artwork, or the images/colors evoked thru certain words) just capture the essence I want to write out which is always a nice challenge! 

I also think hanya yanagihara’s a little life accidentally influenced my writing in a very noticeable way: I finished reading that book last year around this time (which was probably the greatest, most perfectly timed mistake of my life) right before I wrote/finished writing winter coat. the tone and voice of my writing shifted to something closer to that of a little life, which is something I've been subconsciously doing throughout this year too. it’s just the overwhelming tenderness and persistence of friendship that gets to me and I really believe that book impacted my approach to writing tenderness, platonic and romantic love, and just mundanity in general. also what I had admired so much about yanagihara’s prose was how easily she would move in and out of scenes, jumping from present to past to potential futures to present again, and how despite all that movement we as readers were unbelievably close to the main character. her writing is just terribly honest and brutally poetic, which is something I hope to achieve one day with prose and poetry 

also hate to say it but richard siken’s poetry, esp his book crush, is another major accidental influence. I spent my first year of college just reading his poems nearly every night before bed and my favorite from that book is “wishbone” something about it always gets me. the way he writes largely impacted how I write poetry even though I wanted to mimic mary oliver over any other poet when I really started focusing and writing poems in early april. but im too desperate and cruel to exude the tenderness and kindness that oliver’s poems hold, it just ended up being something closer to siren’s crush and war of foxes (maybe after a year or two of tenderness I will calm down and write things that don’t drive me insane)   

all my other influences (james baldwin, chen chen, nam le, mary oliver, toni morrison, etc.) write with such honesty and sincerity that I really admire and want to emulate within my own writing; that and their own interpretations of tenderness. I can also easily say that children’s books (like frog and toad, miraculous journey of edward tulane, etc.) and movies (particularly ghibli, but also 80s/90s/00s animated stuff) are strangely and immensely influential for the same reason: tenderness. I just really crave it and hope that my writing on all accounts can capture that 

and it’s important to note that a lot of my friends and writers that I follow on here, twitter, etc. are super important to me and my writing like y’all really helped me grow as a writer and see things in new ways which is why I love writing so much; it’s a community thing that relies on us communicating and sharing and responding to one another, it’s always been that. y’all really influence my writing and it’ll always be changing and moving to match the sexy iconic ideas y’all have sitting in ur big brains :’)

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