Late to the Influences Party

Most of the authors of influence for me have already been named here, so I'm just going to run through those names aqnd some other quickly: Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, for their skill at retelling tales and exposing the humanity of their characters; J.R.R. Tolkein, Jules Verne, C.S. Lewis, and H.G. Wells for the grandness of their vision; Bradbury and Poe for their darkness and their lyricism; Orson Scott Card for the honesty of his characters; Hemingway for his quietude; Byron, Frost, Whitman, and Emerson for believing in beauty still; and the unknown authors of Beowulf and other ancient myths, the grandeur of whose stories is seldom matched today, and whose inspiration we draw upon so often in shaping our own tales.

There are a couple of others though that no one has mentioned, and who for me had had a significant impact:

Hermann Hesse has a fantastic dichotomy between emotion and logic that runs through most of his work, and which he spent years exploring. No where is it more in the forefront than in Narcissus and Goldmund, though it is a significant theme in both Steppenwolf and Demian, and to a lesser degree in his seminal Siddhartha. I've always been fascinated by what I believe is not an entirely artificial distinction between the gut-level, animal ways and the abstract mental ways of relating to the world, so I've greatly appreciated his work at exploring those ideas.

Guy Gavriel Kay has been and remains an inspiration to me, both for the mastery of his stand-alone works Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan, and the imperfection of his earliest writings (The Fionavar Tapestry)--and above all, the beauty he draws out from the extraordinarily human characters he writes, whether they be beggars or kings. He is able to invoke the capacity for greatness in anyone, which I find very appealing both as a reader and as a writer, and he does so with a loving ear for the language, which is always a bright point for me. One of my biggest attractions in reading a story is in finding words well-crafted and lovingly laid out, something at which Kay excels.

And Faulkner, whom I pick up on occasion solely to remind myself that the art of words cannot, ever, become more important than communicating clearly to the reader, else I cease to be a storyteller and become instead an idiot rambling drunkenly in the inky dark blackness to myself and those unfortunate enough to stand nearby or those who would read on and on despite an utter lack of structure or sentences or even thought process evident beneath the surface of the la-ti-da tonal sounds of hearing myself talk...

Not all Faulkner, but enough.