I was really awed and inspired by Alice Hoffman’s brief speech and reading at the Terrace Room last week. She is a truly fascinating person with wonderful advice and insights for younger readers and writers. I was really amazed when she said that she had almost dropped out of high school; sometimes I forget that not all “successful” people were on the path to succeed throughout their whole lives. She has certainly come a long way from where she started out, in terms of her education and her appreciation for learning. It’s so interesting how people’s lives can take such strange twists and turns and end up in very different directions from where they began.
I was also fascinated by what Hoffman said about the development of writers. She commented at one point that the books that you read as a child and as a young adult really affect you and your writing style, that those authors and stories manifest themselves in your own writing. To me, this seems both incredibly obvious and remarkably insightful. On the one hand, of course your past reading will affect your present writing; it seems natural that your writing would be influenced by other writers whom you had previously read. On the other hand, I would never independently think of myself and of my own writing style as a composite of those authors that I had read before and that had really resonated with me. I would be more inclined to think of myself as a trailblazer, creating a writing style that was uniquely my own. And yet, how can one really do that if one has absorbed so much writing previously and has reflected on other authors? One must necessarily be shaped by those other stories that had moved one in a certain way. And as I reflect on this topic, I remember a perfect example from my own life of the influence of writers on my writing. At one point two years ago, I let my best friend read a few pages of my journal, because there was something in it pertaining to her that I thought she would find amusing. Her reaction after reading it? “Wow, your journal sounds just like a Jane Austen novel.” I think, with that realization having now hit me, I’ll have to agree with Alice Hoffman on this question, and concede that no matter how independent I may think my writing is, I am indeed affected by other writers whom I admire.
Another comment that Hoffman made about developing writers was that there’s a fine line between being a reader and being a writer. She stated the difference quite clearly, as a cause-and-effect situation: “You become a writer when there’s a book that you want to read and you realize that it hasn’t been written yet.” I thought that this was a fantastic way of summing up the reader/writer relationship. It seems to accurately reflect the transition of many people into writers. Hoffman also stated that becoming a writer isn’t a choice—you do it because you have to tell stories. I was also interested by this comment; clearly, for Hoffman herself, the process of becoming a writer wasn’t really an intentional development, it was more of a necessary change in her life. I think it’s great that she felt compelled to tell stories for a living, stories that hadn’t been told before, and that that’s why she became an author. I look forward to reading some of those stories sometime. Maybe they will then become manifested in my storytelling, as the cycle goes.
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