This month’s Merry-Go-Round topic is a hard one for me, though perhaps not for the reasons you suspect. The topic is “If you could be another writer, who would you want to be? Or what have you learned from them?” While I do not want to become another writer, I have certainly learned from many. This answer will have some crossover in my favorite reads because that’s whom I learn from as well, but the focus will be different.My earliest influence as a writer has to be Andrew Lang, who compiled a series of fairytale books. From those, I learned the patterns, tropes, that underlie many genres, and I learned my first rebellions. My early stories were all fairytales, but while some followed the tropes, others broke them by empowering the female characters, undermining the concept of clear good and evil, and making other changes to reflect my complex reality. I think of one in particular where the beast terrifying the land is the ensorcelled twin brother of a simple peasant…and my “princess” is another peasant who goes to the king to demand assistance, and ends up accepting both brothers into her life.
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