This is not just exclusive to poets, novelists, and screenwriters. Role-playing partners and other such things can have an impact on our writing style through collaborative or non-collaborative forms.

I've always found this question particularly interesting, but as we go into the new year who are your biggest influences on your craft and why?

R.A. Salvatore is definitely my biggest influence and he got me into writing. William King is a close second, along with Robert Jordan, Richard Baker, R Lee Byers, and Tolkien of course.

There's a lot of influences I could list but I'm feeling lazy today. As for roleplay partners, idk about influences but I am slightly jealous of one or two.

The writer that most inspired my early writing is Michael Crichton. He's the main reason why I do so much research on things before writing about them, and his clear prose style has an influence you can see even now.

Since then, I've borrowed a bit from other role players here and there. It happened a lot more often when I was new to role playing and there were a lot of people who wrote better than I did. I'd pick up on what made their posts better than mine and do my best to match them.

As I got better, there were fewer people to learn from. Moreover, you get to a point where you need to learn what resides behind the words to become a better writer. Things like what types of characters work well together, how to set up plot threads, and stuff like that. It's more than just being a good writer though, since not all of that stuff translates perfectly to being a good role player. In that regard, I learned a lot from reading the opinions of critics. To which there were too many to count. I also had the pleasure of having a retired marvel editor (Eliot Brown) Look over some of my short stories and tell me about the sort of stuff I was doing wrong. A humbling experience to be sure, but also an important milestone for my writing.

It's sort of a nebulous answer, but that's where I'm at.

Going into the new year, I would like to read more books. I tend to do a lot of reading, but it's seldom something like a novel or long story. We'll see I guess.

The author Gaston Leroux is definitely in my list thanks to his many creative horror stories. Hm let's see, J. R. R. Tolkien too, he paved the way for modern fantasy epics with magic and adventure and peril.

Poetic language, Patrick Rothfuss.

Comedy, Terry Pratchett and David Wong, with Neal Stephenson at his best in Snow Crash.

Character dialogue and fighting scenes, Joe Abercrombie.

Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill have been pretty huge influences when I'm describing something "scary".

Oh and writing with Leidenschaft along with Poohead and Peik are definitely why I can even write at all. My writing was godawful before that.

Honorable Mentions: Chris Avellone, whatever god of chaos wrote Disco Elysium (I SUSPECT my writing is going to be heavily influenced by them), Douglas Addams, Welcome to Nightvales various writers, The Magnus Archives main writer Jonathan Sims.

I like Frank Miller, he did Sin City, and then work on DareDevil and Punisher, too.

Tim Allen was the author of one of the first books I read on my own, so I'll mention him. And, the Hounds of Baskersville was one of the better stories I read.

I'm a Resident Evil fan, so S.D. Perry is cool. (<***edit, originally I listed Paul W.S. Anderson, but he is the director of the movies)

There's several more I'd like to add, but these guys come to mind when I think about literature and film.

Forgot the novel called the Maltese Falcon. I LOVED IT. It was written by Dashiell Hammet.

Me, myself and I.

Oh and writing with Leidenschaft along with Poohead and Peik are definitely why I can even write at all. My writing was godawful before that.

And you've definitely improved, my friend.

I don't really have one off the top of my head. I just started off bad and got better by reading guides. Maybe Andrew Hussie kinda?

Brandon Sanderson has influenced my character's mindsets wayyy too much. Everyone is always finding ways to optimize, customize, and break the magic systems they're in.

In terms of people I know, I think it's my DnD group. I'm now a forever GM.

No book author really inspired me to write, I just kinda did. However people that I know or knew inspired me to roleplay. Especially people on this site.

Brandon Sanderson and the rest of the crew at the Writing Excuses podcast had a huge influence on my writing style and my approach to the meta of writing, as they were one of my main resources during my initial research period before I started roleplaying.

Ever since reading a single excerpt from Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" his writing style began rubbing off on me as well.

Magic the Gathering and World of Warcraft I feel like an impact on my writing and design of world and characters as well.

And of course let's not forget the industrial amounts of anime and manga I consume.

There's probably more influences I could name if I went back to look through the many, many things I read- especially since when I was younger I was an absolute bookworm- but for now, these are the ones that come to mind.

@Idea

A fellow BrandoSando fan :D

My writing style is probably somewhere between Mary Shelley when I get verbose and descriptive, Bruce Coville and Paul Dini for actual story telling (my childhood in a nutshell), and R. L. Stine for formatting (and the occasional "there's another plot here you completely overlooked. I'm taking it since you aren't doing anything with it"). There's probably influence from other authors mingled in here and there, since I tend to read things I find interesting, but don't always pay attention to who wrote it.

Not even kidding about the formatting. I once picked up a Goosebumps book to double check something, and I noticed I basically do the quick, "one-two sentence paragraph, dialogue, one-two sentence paragraph, dialgue, etc., with the occasional-long-paragraph-to-break-things-up" thing Stine does. Unlike Stine, I write chapters more than four pages when I'm writing actual stories and not RP. XP

Nobody I'm consciously aware of. It's pretty much guaranteed I'll have gotten subconsciously influenced by one thing or the other, but I haven't looked at any single written piece and been like "yeah that is peak literature" and tried to ape it.

I'm aware that's a pretty big non-answer. Probably the reason why my writing's bad; I don't actually pay that much attention to who writes in which ways. Sure, I'll definitely enjoy certain authors, but I don't really care how they write as much as I care what they write. And, being the massive fucking weeb I am, my themes of choice will often come from some videogame or anime rather than a book, meaning my writing isn't suited to any form of traditional literature.

Speaking of videogame writers though, Natsuko Ishikawa is a goddamn visionary. Every bit of FFXIV she's written for are easily the best parts of the game, and her talent shines even through a localisation that changes a lot of elements as to how the dialogue is conveyed. (Speaking of which, shout-out to the lead localizer Koji Fox too.)

Keeping with Square, I'm also a massive fan of anything Yoko Taro's ever touched. I can't call him an inspiration for my own writing, though. You gotta think like that man if you want to write like him and I sure as shit don't. For one, I lack a sense of humor :).

@Stormflyxand @Dervish have been a big writing influence for me in the last three years, I'd say ^^

I'm just gonna say it.

Most of my influences are from the people I write with here.

Other times it's a mix of epiphanies or my love of references or lemotifs.

I don't know what I'm doing half the time yet people like what I put out.

To be perfectly honest, it's a mixture of King, Orwell and Child that influenced my writing.

Orwell was partly an overall meta-influence in terms of how I wrote and the strictures in which my writing held to. I still maintain Politics and the English Language (1946), whilst overall being more relevant for essays rather than narrative prose, helped me immensely with peeling away the seemingly challenging nature of writing and delving deep into its guts.

King is the major influence in terms of how I set up atmosphere. It's that unrefined style combined with haunting, visceral imagery that I try and put into what I write. It's also the weird surreal situations he sets up combined with the in-laid horror that I unconsciously replicate in my prose whenever I have the chance.

Child's penchant for writing out the rhythm of action held true when I began roleplaying and still holds true today. In spite of his failures, he's got a real good way of getting the grit of fisticuffs or a old fashioned melee down that doesn't feel metronomic like other writers.

There are definitely some roleplayers that I took a lot of inspiration from in my early years of writing, particularly a group I played with on oldguild that was billed as casual, but really ended up being advanced in terms of post length and of their quality. At the time I was still a kid and completely out of depth to be honest, but I liked the story and I liked the group, so I stuck with it and ended up playing with those guys for a number of years. It really pushed me to become so much of a better writer.

So yeah thanks @Blazion, @wild-kitsune, @Pumirya, @Harbinger, and @Reaper. Most of you aren't around anymore, but I learned a lot from you guys, and I'll never forget Feral, it was truly the best.

Other than that there are definitely authors have been a huge influence of me. In my earlier years Stephen King would have been foremost amongst those, but now I think its probably GRRM. Though the writer I whose style I would love to be able to imitate above all others is most definitely Ursula K. LeGuin. Hilary Mantel gets a shout for leading me to experiment much more with tense, Ian M. Banks for non-linear story structure.

Stephen King
Brandon Sanderson
Orson Scott Card

Stephen King had the biggest impact on my style of writing because I voraciously read through most of his work from about 11 on. Distinctly remember sitting in a laundromat, kicking my feet, reading the Richard Bachman book "Desperation"

His weird narrative stuff and tendency to address the reader stuck pretty well. He sometimes uses a sort of third person omniscient perspective to tell the reader stuff that the character wouldn't know or that didn't occur during the timespan of the story. Hell he sometimes even directly addresses the reader for a bit with lines like "and that, dear reader, was the last time that Will Light would ever play fetch with his dear best friend Blue."

Sanderson and Card I think influenced me in that they address their subjects with a gravity and realness not often seen elsewhere. The Enders Game series and the Stormlight Archives series. Man. Go read the Stormlight Archives series. The way it builds is incredible, I can't wait until the next one releases.