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)

But then a funny thing happened.  I started to hate what I was writing.

Both novels were of the supernatural horror variety, influenced by a steady diet of King, Straub, Koontz, and McCammon that I’d fed on as a teenager and young adult.  And although I was proud of both novels, the more time I spent re-writing them, the more I realized that I was growing to hate them.

What had once been fun had now become tedious, painful work.

So after struggling with the rewrites for several months, I told the two small presses that I wouldn’t be submitting the manuscripts and I kissed my opportunity to become a published novelist goodbye.

Then I stopped writing.

For the next year and a half I played a lot of golf and spent more time reading and playing with my dog.  I wrote a best man’s speech based on Hamlet (“To wed or not to wed, that is the question…”) and a 40th birthday poem for my wife based on The Raven (“Once upon a birthday dreary…”), but that was about it.

Sometime in the middle of all of this, I read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.

Although I’d seen Fight Club (one of my favorite all time films), I’d never read the novel or any of Palahniuk’s other books.  But for some reason, this novel resonated with me on a level I hadn’t previously experienced.  And when I was done, I had an “a-ha” moment.

While my three novels and four dozen short stories had all predominantly been influenced by my love of horror, I’d written a few short stories that were dark comedy with a supernatural edge to them.  But I’d never thought about writing anything other than straight horror novels.

Lullaby changed all that.

After finishing Lullaby, I began to think about turning a short story of mine into a full-length novel.  The story, “A Zombie’s Lament,” dealt with a group of zombies who attend Undead Anonymous meetings and yearn for civil rights.  About a year later, I wrote the opening scene for Breathers.

(Next entry:  M is for Maggots)