What book made you want to be a writer?

@wattpad_to_print OP

1mo ago

Somewhere there's a book that flipped the switch for every one of us. The one where you closed the back cover and thought, oh, I want to do THAT. Mine was 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' at age seven, purely because Lewis made a wardrobe terrifying and magical with what felt like no effort. What was yours, and what exactly did it teach you?

10 comments

@inkstainedmara1mo ago

'Charlotte's Web', and what it taught me was that you can earn a death. I'd read books where things died, but White spent the whole book making me love a spider so that her quiet end in the empty fairground actually meant something. I learned that grief in fiction is a debt you pay for earlier with attention. I've been trying to earn my endings ever since.

@dorian_w1mo ago

Earning a death by paying for it earlier with attention is the cleanest description of foreshadowing-as-emotion I've ever read. Mine was 'Jane Eyre', specifically the realization that a first-person narrator could be plain, poor, angry, and still the most magnetic person in the room. Bronte taught me that interiority beats spectacle. You don't need a dragon if you have a furious, watchful mind on the page.

@kafka_lite1mo ago

'The Metamorphosis', obviously, given the name I chose. What got me wasn't the bug. It was that Kafka spends almost no time explaining how or why, he just opens with it as a fact and moves straight to the family's annoyance about logistics. It taught me that the surreal lands hardest when you treat it as mundane. Don't justify the impossible, just bill it as an inconvenience.

@once_more_writer1mo ago

Treating the impossible as a mere inconvenience is the whole engine of magical realism and you nailed why it works. For me it was 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Garcia Marquez taught me that a single sentence can hold a birth, a war, and an old man's death without flinching. I came away believing you could compress decades into a clause if you trusted the reader to keep up.

@seaglass_stories1mo ago

'The Snowy Day' by Ezra Jack Keats, and I'm not embarrassed it's a picture book. The page where the kid puts a snowball in his pocket and it's gone by the time he gets inside broke something open in me at five. It taught me that loss can be the size of a snowball and still feel total. Small stakes, fully felt, beats big stakes thinly sketched every time.

@paperboats1mo ago

The melted snowball is one of the great quiet gut-punches in all of children's literature and I'm glad someone said it. Mine was 'A Wizard of Earthsea'. Le Guin taught me that the real story isn't the monster, it's the shadow you cast yourself, and that naming a thing truly is the only way to have power over it. I write about characters confronting their own worst selves because of that book.

@foggy_chapters1mo ago

Le Guin and the shadow being yourself, yes. 'Frankenstein' did it for me and not for the horror. It was the structure, the story nested inside letters inside another account, all these frames around a creature who just wanted to be loved. Shelley taught me that who tells the story changes the story. I've been obsessed with unreliable, biased narrators ever since.

@verse_and_vice1mo ago

'The Waste Land', which is an odd answer because I write fiction, not poetry. But Eliot taught me that fragments can be a structure, that you can build something whole out of broken overheard pieces and let the reader assemble the meaning. My novels are stitched from short shards because a poem I barely understood at nineteen showed me white space could carry weight.

@first_draft_dani1mo ago

White space carrying weight is exactly what poetry teaches prose writers if we let it. Mine is 'Matilda'. Dahl taught me that children take cruelty seriously and that a book respecting that is a book a kid will defend with their life. He never softened the Trunchbull. I write for young readers now and that lesson, don't lie to kids about how bad adults can be, is my entire compass.

@wattpad_to_printOP1mo ago

Dahl refusing to soften the Trunchbull is why a generation trusts him, you're completely right. I'm floored by this thread. Picture books to Eliot to Kafka and every single one taught a real craft lesson, not just 'it was good'. My summary: the formative book isn't the best one you read, it's the one where you first saw the trick being done. The wardrobe was mine. Yours are now my reading list.