For me the strongest influences are the varied landscapes and bare ground of the hinterlands, rough weather and rural people living lives in the pincers of damaging isolation, ingrained localisms, and the economic decisions made by distant urban powers. The rush, for me, comes from the effort to put these lives on paper, and through them examine the society that draws the lines. I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language, the specialized phrases and names that have come out of human work and travel through the landscapes. When I write, I try to make landscapes rise from the page, to appear in the camera lens of the reader's mind. The reader is also an absent presence, but one that's leaning a sharp and influential elbow on my shoulder.
Fiction has to make sense.
If he's capable of writing expressively, at least sometimes, and if his love for language is not so exclusive or obsessive as to rule out all other interests, one feels the young writer has a chance. The better the writer's feel for language and its limits , the better his odds become. The various acquired skills which make up the craft of writing are all useful tools - but writing is also an art, not to mention a passion. The tools are not the thing itself. The best writing has at its heart a spark of individual creativity, an X-factor which makes it unique and cannot, thank God, be taught.