Favorie authors

[Guenter Heyes - (Author)]

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Stahl Else

Karl Friedrich May

Harper Lee

Siegfried Lenz

Wolfgang Borchert

... are the writers who I call most influential to my life.

I have always read a lot as a kid. One of the reasons was that since the age of 8 till about puberty at 12 I was a pretty “sick puppy” with still till today inexplicable ailments. So I spent a lot of time at home, hospitals and naturally out from school.

Every Wednesday our local cinema played movies that were not the blockbusters of the day but quite educational and otherwise selected for their cultural values. One of these Wednesday movies was “To Kill a Mockingbird” which I saw just at the beginning of my recovery from these unexplained ailments.

From then on I was hooked: My parents agreed to use my “book wish-list” for Christmas. So instead of toys and other “IN-Stuff” I settled for the list of books that I had seen the movies of or had heard about but were out of reach from my pocket money.

The next major writer became Exupery. This was rather a hate turned to love experience beginning with the mandatory “School Literature reads” of the “Little Prince” which I hated and found absolute idiotic. – I still have trouble with cartoons, and so called “Children books” and other “non realistic” writing. This is one of the reasons why I never was fond of Star Trek. However I found out that Exupery also had written other books. “Night-Flight” was the book that really got me going.
Lenz, Borchert & Stahl I loved for the content. Karl May, who had written some 70 or so adventure packed books is an author that has been read by every boy in Europe and I believe still, is so. I list him not as a great author in the sense that he wrote pieces of true literature. I list him for a totally different reason.

Karl May’s books are the run of the mill action packed adventure stories, - with one twist that is more depending on his writing style than on the stories.

Karl May had a way of writing that let people talk as they ARE. With that I mean that if he had a character that was university educated, then the same would use the language of his trade and the most complicated words. However if he had a character that was for example an illiterate person with a vocabulary not exceeding 200 words, then he would let him “Talk” this way and explain his life story for 50 pages long with this 200 word vocabulary.

Another issue on him was that he did not “explain people”, he let them explain themselves. This was expressed that he would not talk about a character and narrating that this person had lost his parents in a train crash. He let the person tell his story at the campfire how the train crash happened. It was this reality of letting people talk that inspired me.

After all, this is how life really IS. When we meet people we explain ourselves by telling about our past and they do like wise. And depending on our cultural background, level of education and commandment of speech, this is then the story that the other person hears.

This above explained situation gets me always in trouble with my editors.

They always try to correct that and argue, “This is not proper English”. I KNOW that it is not proper English, then again the character I let talk has not English as his 1st language and a university degree, this IS why he “talks so strange”.

In my excerpt “God Proof” the main character Ardos is seen as using the word “ME” in a grammatically wrong way. He should use “I” but uses “Me” instead. This character speaks “Learned English” and as long as he talks about anything “normal and every day stuff” he does use the proper “I” in his sentences. However when he becomes emotional, he uses “Me” instead of “I”.

It is this uniqueness in character and expression that I learned from reading Karl May, who in literary terms is no one to cry home about in comparison to Harper Lee or Exupery. Yet it is this “Don’t white wash reality” approach to the characters and how they talk that makes him for me my example.

I will continue to write about these authors in follow up discussions.

Guenter

[Joy McQuiston]

My favorite author is Philippa Gregory. I have 10 of her books, mostly written as sequels. She is a fantastic fictional writer, utilizing truthful facts of past British history. The centuries she writes about are from approximately the 15th-19th centuries. Once I begin to read her novels, I am sort of let down after a sequence is finished, until I start a new series of hers.

Other authors I am fond of are Kathleen Winsor, Posie Graeme-Evans and Anne Easter Smith. Each author writes about the past British history, making history come to life.

Joy McQuiston
www.joymcquiston.com

[Jo Webnar Author / Freelance Writer]

I wish I could decide on a favorite author, but I can't. There are just so many different styles and genres, and I love them all. I can tell you that I absolutely devour Koontz, Patterson, Evanovich, Hoag, Roberts, Spenser, etc. The list is so long that it would take me hours to list them. My favorite book of all times was "The Watchers" by Koontz. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me go. Of course other authors have done that since, but it seems like I always remember that book. "The Green Mile" really surprised me by King. It was different from some of the really ...out there...books he had been writing, and it's one of my favorites. Most of the really talented and well known authors "stretch" themselves. I love Patterson, but I do have to admit that the books he coauthors haven't met his standards. I do think it's great that he is helping other authors.
I have been known to read posters, ingredients on cans, etc., if there is nothing else availabe. When I was 12, I had read every book in the "allowed" section of our small town library. I can remember the librarian wouldn't let me check out "Hawaii" because she thought it was an adult book and too impressionable for a child.