Kill Your Heroes

Well, maybe not literally. Bear with me.

Each of us can name at least a couple of writers who've influenced our own work. I've widened my net in recent years, so my list is different now than it was when I was young and only read genre.

In my early days, the formative four – in no particular order – were Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, Rod Serling, and Stephen King.

If you're not a big fan of science fiction or horror, you might not recognize the first three as keystone influences on an entire generation – even two generations – of speculative fiction writers.

Richard Matheson, perhaps best known for his novel I Am Legend (now being made into a feature film starring Will Smith), a modern take on the vampire myth originally published in the mid 50's and still relevant today, also wrote dozens of short stories and the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” starring a young William Shatner. Matheson is still writing and reinventing, subverting staple genre cliches and reaching outside the recognized bounds of genre storytelling to create original and compelling fiction. A more recent example is Stir of Echoes, adapted for the screen and directed by David Koepp (another of my screenwriting heroes).

Harlan Ellison has written so much and so diversely it's difficult to assess his influence on literature as a whole, much less science fiction and horror. His short story Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman is a standard in college literature textbooks, and the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever is considered the best of the series.

Most of you should recognize Rod Serling's name even if you're not a genre fan. He's the tall, lanky guy talking through clenched teeth, a smoldering cigarette resting between index and middle fingers, in the introduction to each episode of The Twilight Zone. He also wrote a good many episodes and was responsible for the O. Henry ironic-twist-ending format that endured throughout the life of the series.

I love Serling's Twilight Zone work, but my favorite is his script for the original Planet of the Apes film starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall. All of Heston's piquant, morbid and cynical monologues in the first act are Serling's, as is the ending (I won't reveal the twist here; if you haven't seen the film in awhile, go rent it. It's still great fun.)

Even if you don't read genre fiction at all, there's no way you haven't heard of Stephen King. He's a bonafide celebrity in a small, segregated portion of the entertainment medium that normally enjoys a peculiar sort of anonymity. Stephen King is a household name.

The Shining is the book that made me want to do this for a living. I lived in that hotel, happily haunted by an unbalanced caretaker, a woman in a bathtub and a roque mallet. I returned voluntarily, and often. I read the novel again last year, and it stands as a contemporary classic of supernatural literature, right up there with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub's Ghost Story.

When I began writing seriously, my work took on the “flavor” of whoever I was reading that week. I have a cardboard box full of stories that read like early Stephen King short stories, or Ellison, or Serling or occasionally Hunter Thompson (he's not technically fiction, so I didn't include him here). Even some of my early published work carries trace elements of these formative voices.

My writing voice doesn't sound like King's anymore. It doesn't sound like Ellison, or Matheson, or Serling, or any of those guys. It sounds like me. As you get older, write more, and grow as a person, your own voice begins to shine out. Your own thoughts and ideas become more important to you than the ideas of your favorite writers.

This is a good thing, if a little sad. Stepping away from your idols means seeing, finally, their feet of clay. It means understanding that they arrived at these books not through some semi-magical, alchemical process but through simple hard work and dedication.

It may also mean falling out of love with their work as you get older – becoming more critical, accustomed to their themes, idioms, modes of expression. That's happening to me now. I'm not a fan of King's more recent works, for instance. But that's as much about me as it is him. His work has changed, but so have I. It's part of the very necessary growth process that will take your own work to the next level – yet another reason there's no such thing as bad writing. Every word you write moves you one step further away from imitative hero worship and toward your own individual, legitimate perspective.

It will continue – it must continue – if you intend to sustain a career. Change and growth, coupled with integrity, are as fundamental as language.

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