Who has inspired you to become a writer, inspired your story, or just inspired you in general? Would be great if you could say why, but you don’t have to.
These are my main ones:
Shannon Hale
Philip Pullman
Ransom Riggs
Catherine Doyle
These are the ones that inspired me in general or in small ways:
Khaled Hosseini
Lewis Carroll
C. S. Lewis
Garth Nix
Tamora Pierce
Anthony Doerr
China Mieville
In no particular order:
all the Brontës, but especially Anne
Elizabeth Gaskell
Susanna Clarke
Donna Tartt
Emily St. John Mandel
Ottessa Moshfegh
Jennifer Egan
Sally Rooney
Stephen Fry
Italo Calvino
I’ve been meaning to make a thread like this (with a little twist) for weeks, but you beat me to it xD. I don’t think I have any 
.
I have stories I’ve been inspired by though, so I guess in that sense the authors influenced me.
Rick Riordan
R F Kuang
Xiran Jay Zhao
Inspired is a very heavy thing.
Terry Pratchett: dry humor, making absurdism work, satire, self-containing magic rules.
RA Salvatore: serious drama in fantasy.
CJ Cherryh: building a world off the small things, going from full ignorance to predicting how the pnce-alien will think, with time.
Mercedes Lackey: serial world building that is simple, writing on different intellectual levels, depending on the story.
Terry Brooks: making science out of fantasy, making religion out of urban fantasy.
Sherralyn Kenyan: the art of smut…and not always positive. (She has a thing for commando! lawd save me from repetition).
Anne McCaffrey: writing seamless scifi-fantasy.
C.S. Lewis: the art of Allegorical writing, dreased in modern prose…which helps with foreshadowing.
Eminem: spastic synonyms, rhyme, rhythm, ect.
Now, you bet I dont get this all down.
Rick Riordan for the whole quest-adventure-cast of characters thing!! Along with pacing and series structure.
Maggie Stiefvater for her descriptions.
Neil Gaiman for atmosphere and that sort of eerie-paranormal-something’s off touch he’s got.
Arundhati Roy for grace and structure of storytelling—heteroglossia and that sort of “unfurling petal” story format.
The Welcome to Night Vale people—Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink—for a bunch of reasons, really. The descriptions are beautifully done and creepy, the characters are interesting, well-developed, and thought-through, every romance subplot is perfect and devastating, and the way they build story arcs is brilliant. Also, plot twists. Genuinely their books are the only books with plot twists that have actually shocked me.
Andre Norton
I cut my science fiction teeth on her books, and my writing style is said to emulate hers pretty closely. I take that as a huge compliment.
Joan Vinge
From the Snow Queen to the Summer Queen to World’s End, man does this lady know how to write.
Alan Dean Foster
Another master from the same era as Norton. He’s even written a book or two in the Star Wars Franchise!
I am, but a patchwork of unsolicited ideas, influences and inaccurate quotes.
Thats an easy one. Andy McDermott and Matthew Reilly. Absoulte favourites.
Matthew Reilly got me into fiction writing, Ice Station and Area 7 * were the first books of his I read, but I lost interest in his works after Scarecrow.
For action writing authors, I matured into Chris Ryan and Andy McNab. Honourable mention to John le Carré and Ian Rankin who also inspired some of my characters and plots. A long time ago I once binge-read a bookcase worth of Terry Prattchett’s works, but he didn’t really influence my writing (just my procrastination priorities).
I read these books again last week, and its almost comical the number of technical and terminology mistakes he made. And Scarecrow appeared to have at best a coincidental acquaintance with reality.
JRR Tolkien for fantasy.
HG Wells for Sci-Fi.
Marcus Heitz for character ruining, and plot ripping (Or how to avoid it).
SD
Which stories are they?
I forgot Terry Pratchett for my list! He’s quite something, isn’t he? I’ve only read two books by him, but I can tell why so many people like him.
The kind that make you put the book down for a moment to process it? Those are good plot twists. Speaking of… Dan Brown’s Inferno did that to me. And The Shadow of Wind.
Oh Star Wars! I thought that name sounded familiar to me.
Where do your main influences come from?
@alenatenjo and @MatthewJH both of you mentioned Matthew Reilly one after another. That’s interesting.
@alenatenjo what do you think of these books mentioned here?
A great sci-fi classic 
I read the Time Machine and it inspired me to write a short story a long time ago. I remember the descriptions of scenes taking my breath away.
Lots of mangas and animes! Inuyasha, Princess Mononoke, Her Majesty’s Dog, There’s a theme here lol. Oh, Halloweentown, too.
Maruyama has shown me how you can effortlessly juggle a massive cast and create inhuman characters that are relateable to humans.
I was 7 when I read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis and finishing that book made me realise that I want to write as well.
My current biggest inspiration is Victoria Aveyard, who I hold dear to my heart
He had an absolutely foridable intellect, and was skewring England’s political scene, so there are things “us foreigners” miss.
For example. He did a gender-bender on Monsterous Regiment where one of the observations was that women in battle (in this case pretending to be men) are far more violently warlike.
I read that 10, 15 years back, and until I saw that there was clear evidence of Queens having more bloody wars than Kings, I would have just taken it as an old man’s observations. No, he was academically sound.
Same thing when taken on an indivisual level:
I suspect that he was looking at women like Kit Cavanaugh / Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, Deborah Sampson, Sarah Emma Edmonds, etc.
They had to be tough as nails because they couldn’t be caught.
And like a lot of brilliant people, he lost that mind as he approached the end of his life.
Also Michel Foucault and Judith Butler because everything I write is influenced by them.
Other writers I think about a lot tho I haven’t read enough to pull as an influence:
Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Pat Barker, Eva Balthasar, Derek Owusu, Adam Mars-Jones, Sarah Waters, Mariana Enriquez, Bryan Washington.
Is this the movie one? The American movie one? The one where the grandma is actually a witch?
Yep! But I believe it was a story first actually.