One gets infected, it is true, by the style of a work that one has been reading.- Hercule Poirot, in The Clocks. Agatha Christie
This is the best phrasing I have read of something I have always known to be true and have expressed often. I have kept a journal for many years and I can always tell who I was reading at the time I wrote something. My Hemingway journal entries are the most obvious. Dickens and Austen I can’t distinguish, but I know I’m reading something from those times.
I used to wonder whether it was a bad thing. Is my own style so undefined that it can be so easily “infected”? I still have something of a concern about this, but I see it much more as a good thing. I conclude that it’s just that I haven’t yet developed my own style to the point where I’m conscious of it and careful enough to nurture it and ensure it doesn’t become contaminated or corrupted.
Should you read the authors you want to emulate when you are preparing to write something? I would say definitely yes. It’s my intention when I one day sit down to write my masterpiece first novel (ahem!), to re-read all of the books I have annotated over the years for having stylistic, development, or other devices that I want to weave into my own writing.
Is it contrived that I’m conscious of this? Absolutely not. Musicians have their influences as do writers. What I don’t think is generally discussed is how what you are reading or listening to right at the moment impacts your own work. I’m curious whether writers cultivate this phenomenon or even are aware of it when they write.
