S.G. Browne

P is for Palahniuk

“Another thing is no matter how much you think you love someone, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

If you’ve checked out Bio and Q&A on the Founder’s page on my web site or been following Breathers From A to Z (L is for Lullaby), you know that Chuck Palahniuk is one of my major influences and favorite authors.  I’m especially fond of his novels Lullaby, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters.  And Fight Club is at the top of my list of favorite films.”On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

But while Chuck gets props for helping me to find a narrative voice that resonates with me, there are other writers, both in fiction and in film, who inspire my own writing and have unknowingly participated in my development as a writer:

Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job / Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal / Fool)
Nick Hornby (About a Boy / High Fidelity)
Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich / Adaptation / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Wes Anderson (Rushmore / The Royal Tenenbaums / The Darjeeling Limited)
David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster / I Heart Huckabees)
Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo / The Big Lebowski / Raising Arizona)

As you can see, screenplay writers are as big of an influence on me as fiction authors, though I also appreciate reads by Bret Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  And although I don’t tend to read him as much as I used to back in the late 80s and through the 90s when I was devouring a steady diet of Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson, Stephen King is the reason I wanted to become a writer.

(Next entry:  Q is for Quitting)

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Filed under: Breathers,The Writing Life — Tags: , — S.G. Browne @ 3:14 pm

1 Comment »

  1. Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!

    Comment by KrisBelucci — June 1, 2009 @ 7:35 pm

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