Kyle Phoenix, Writer and student & Instructor at Columbia University
Jackie Collins and One Life to Live, the soap opera. I read The Stud, The Bitch, Chances, Lucky and Hollywood Wives from my grandmothers book cabinet, she read five books a week. JC taught me how to make a character (and what a blowjob was) but most importantly how to pace a storyline, how to make every character hero or villain the center of their own universe.
Tina Lord and Gabrielle Medina (and the OLTL writers) taught me how each scene must earn the next, no simple cousins or lovely bits, every scene earns it's keep. If it doesn't it gets cut and that expands to characters and dialogue. Every piece must matter, must be valuable to the reader or the storyline.
In Hush, a book I'm almost done with now, the editor sent it back with praise and suggestions but one glaring question ----of all the characters who was the protagonist? I'd woven together a group but never tagged one as the nexus, the strongest. I went back and to Prince's Boys & Girls went back and hand wrote another hundred pages on just 1 person because I had forgotten that you want to imagine the protagonist as the star who is paid the most because they give the most.
JC taught me about big books with lots of people but a firm star.
Tina and Gabrielle taught me that insanity feels like sanity and how to distinguish voices with characters. Also how women verbally communicate differently and to become the woman or man I'm writing about, not to judge them but to honor their reality unless the character dislikes it. In Hush, a woman is a severe drug addict but I give her a reason that she doesn't completely understand until after she dies but I never shame her to herself.
Toni Morrison ----how to just flow, ride the stallion. I just read God Help the Child a few months ago and it was like watching Yoda leap through time and space. I literally cried it was so good. Executed like a mistress of the art. Not a long book. I couldn't even see her editor in it because its like one clear note sung and at the same time, a riff off of Tar Baby 30 plus years previous.
Flaubert 's Madame Bovary, my mentor Raymond Federman told me I wrote women, their interiors like Flaubert so I was terrified to read him. When I did, I devoured it and sobbed at the end because I understood that interior view.
Louise Erdrich writes the natural hell out of culture. Amazing in it's sparse density.
Raymond Carver commands brevity and storytelling. I've written and published dozens of short stories using a three page full story style that owes a lot to him as a literary challenge to brevity and concision.
Peter David writes fantasy and sly humor very well.
Walter Moseley is the inheritor of Carvers crown in multiple characters as struggling against race, reality, pain. Always deep and beautiful, the mystery lost to the atmosphere he creates.
Thomas Perry writes action and thinking characters really well.
And where could I be without Elmore Leonard? I have revised a 550 page novel on his suggestion about dialogue and eradicating said, he said, she said and finding a way to make the dialogue distinguishable to characters.
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