The Orchestra Careening Through My Oddyknocky…

On the Writers, Musicians, and Filmmakers Who Made Me

Every writer is a thief. Not in any criminal sense — more like a magpie, compulsively gathering shiny things and weaving them into a nest that, over time, starts to look original. I've been writing long enough now to take a hard look at my nest and recognize most of the pieces. They come from books I devoured at midnight, albums I played until the grooves wore thin, and films that rewired something fundamental in my brain. This is my attempt to name them honestly.

The Literary Architects: King, Thompson, Bradbury, Pratchett

Stephen King taught me that horror lives in the ordinary. Not in the monster under the bed, but in the bed itself — in the marriage that's going wrong, in the town with its small cruelties and its petty gods, in the way a man can love something so much it starts eating him alive. King gave me permission to write big, messy, human stories that happen to have monsters in them. He showed me that populist and literary aren't opposites — that a paperback somebody reads on a bus can break their heart just as thoroughly as anything shelved under Literary Fiction. His voice is immediate, vernacular, and relentless, and when I'm working in what I think of as my Thompson-King register, I'm reaching for that quality: prose that grabs you by the collar and won't let go.

Hunter S. Thompson is the other half of that register, and he gave me something King didn't: the narrator as unreliable weapon. Gonzo journalism is really a style philosophy — the idea that subjectivity pushed far enough becomes its own kind of truth. Thompson's sentences lurch and careen; they overpromise and occasionally collapse under their own weight, and that's the point. There's an ecstatic quality to his best work, a sense that the writing itself is barely keeping pace with the experience being described. I think about that when I'm writing characters who are at the edge of their own comprehension — when the world is moving too fast and strange for any tidy narrative to contain it.

Ray Bradbury is where those two instincts get distilled into something quieter and more devastating. If King is the scream and Thompson is the careening laugh, Bradbury is the ache. He could write about October and make you grieve for a childhood you never had. His sentences do something almost musical — they have rhythm and weight and space between the words. He taught me economy without coldness, lyricism without self-indulgence. When I want prose to shimmer, I think about how Bradbury would do it in three short sentences what I've been trying to do in a paragraph.

Terry Pratchett is the fourth wall talking back to you, and he's where my Anthony-Pratchett narrator voice comes from. What looks like comic fantasy is actually a sustained philosophical argument conducted through absurdist premises and footnotes that contain more wisdom than most straight-faced novels manage in their entire length. Pratchett's great trick is that he makes you laugh so hard you don't notice he's breaking your heart. He trusted readers completely — trusted them to follow the joke and the grief simultaneously. I try to earn that trust every time I write a sentence that's trying to do two things at once.

The Music That Thinks It's Literature: Steinman, Springsteen, Meat Loaf, Queen, Elfman

Jim Steinman is probably the most direct influence on my fiction that most people wouldn't expect. Steinman wrote operatic rock — 'Bat Out of Hell,' 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' the Tanz der Vampire score — and his aesthetic is maximalism as moral philosophy. For Steinman, more is always more. The orchestra swells because the emotion demands it. The metaphors pile up because life is that excessive, that much. His songs aren't shy about what they are: they are about the specific, catastrophic enormity of being young and desperate and in love with something you can't quite name. That sensibility is baked into my fiction at the structural level. My baroque maximalism — the tendency to reach for the operatic moment — is Steinman's DNA expressing itself in prose.

Bruce Springsteen is the humanist anchor. Where Steinman is pure heat and spectacle, Springsteen is the Nebraska album, the guy sitting alone in a room with an acoustic guitar, singing about people who got dealt a bad hand and are trying to hold it together anyway. The working class specificity, the American landscape as emotional backdrop, the sense that every ordinary life contains a story worth the telling — that's Springsteen. He keeps me honest when the baroque impulse goes too far. He's the voice that says: get back to the person. Get back to what it feels like.

Meat Loaf — and I say this as someone who will defend the man's catalog with real feeling — showed me that commitment matters more than irony. You can sing about the dashboard lights of a teenage night and mean it completely. The theatricality isn't a defense mechanism; it's the point. Passion delivered without apology is its own form of artistic courage, and the influence I take from Meat Loaf is exactly that: go all the way in. Don't hedge. If you're going to write an overwrought scene, write it as if the world depends on it.

Queen and Danny Elfman are the tonal cousins — both of them trafficking in a kind of gleeful, slightly sinister excess. Queen at their best are playing dress-up with all of Western musical history, trying on opera and music hall and hard rock and glam and finding that all of it fits. Elfman brings the carnival that's slightly wrong, the clockwork that ticks one beat too many, the childlike wonder that has just enough shadows in it to make you uncertain. Together, they give my fiction its sense of play — the awareness that darkness can be fun, that the uncanny can also be funny, that the monsters can have better costumes than the heroes.

The Genre Architects: Hamilton, Clancy, Sanderson, Jordan

Peter F. Hamilton writes space opera the way the universe actually seems to be organized: vast, dense, and relentlessly interconnected. His books feel like civilizations rather than stories. That sense of scale — the confidence to take as much space as the story genuinely requires — is something I've tried to internalize. Hamilton also trusts his readers to track complicated things across long distances, and that trust is something I aspire to as well.

Tom Clancy is procedural conviction. The reason his technothrillers work is that he makes you believe completely in the machinery — of submarines, of intelligence services, of political systems under pressure. That specificity creates a floor of reality beneath even the most outlandish plot developments. When I'm writing what I think of as my Hamilton-Clancy voice, I'm chasing that quality: make the reader believe in the rules, and they'll follow you anywhere.

Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan are the epic fantasy half of that equation — systematic, formal, world-built to the foundations. Sanderson's magic systems have internal logic so airtight they feel like physics. Jordan built a world with its own history, its own idioms, its own weight. Both of them taught me that fantasy's job isn't just to imagine strange things, but to imagine strange things with total coherence. The rules of a world are a promise to the reader, and you keep it.

The Filmmakers: Snyder, Burton, Gilliam

Zack Snyder is the visual influence I'm most willing to argue about, because the discourse around him has become so crowded with noise that it's easy to miss what he's actually doing. Snyder thinks in images the way poets think in metaphors — the slow-motion sequences in his films aren't indulgent, they're punctuation, a way of saying: look at this, really look, the way you'd look at a painting. His Superman weeps and bleeds and bears an impossible weight. His Batman is a man broken by history trying to become something clean. That willingness to take superhero material completely seriously as myth — to treat it with the weight and consequence it actually deserves — shaped how I think about genre fiction. The material is only as shallow as you let it be.

Tim Burton is Elfman's visual twin, and the combination of the two of them gave me a specific aesthetic permission: darkness can be beautiful. Strangeness can be tender. The outsider is the moral center. Burton's films have a quality of melancholy affection — he loves his freaks and misfits genuinely, which is why they resonate. That's the energy I want in my fiction: not contempt for the strange, but deep and specific affection for it.

Terry Gilliam is the final piece, and arguably the most dangerous influence, because Gilliam has no governor on the throttle. Brazil is a nightmare told as a comedy told as a tragedy, and it's simultaneously the most hopeless and most romantic film I've ever seen. Gilliam's vision is maximalist in the Steinman sense, but it's also chaotic in a way that the others aren't — his worlds are literally falling apart, the scaffolding visible, the seams showing. There's an argument embedded in that aesthetic: that reality itself is a fragile construction, that the systems we live inside are absurd and will eventually collapse under their own weight. That argument runs under a lot of my fiction. The scaffolding is always showing, if you look.

What It All Adds Up To

People sometimes ask me what kind of writer I am, and I never have a clean answer. But the honest answer is: I'm an orchestra conductor who collected players from wildly different ensembles. The goal is to get King's emotional immediacy, Thompson's ecstatic velocity, Bradbury's precision and ache, Pratchett's intellectual wit, Steinman's operatic commitment, Springsteen's humanist grounding, Elfman and Burton's beautiful strangeness, Gilliam's baroque chaos, Sanderson's systematic, operatic rigor, and Hamilton's civilizational scale all playing in the same piece without anyone stopping to ask what genre this is.

It shouldn't work. Sometimes it doesn't. But on the good days, when everything clicks, it sounds like something that couldn't have come from anywhere else. Which is, I think, what every writer is actually after: not the influences themselves, but the specific self that emerges from the argument between them.

The magpie nest, as it turns out, is the whole point. The End.

Wait. Oops. I left something out.

Oops. I left something out.

When I wrote the original version of this post — cataloguing King and Thompson and Bradbury and Steinman and Springsteen and the whole baroque orchestra of influences I've been conducting in my head for most of my adult life — I was thinking primarily in terms of books and music and film. The things that feel, culturally, like Legitimate Art Objects. The things you can cite without apology in an interview.

But there is another category. A category that shaped me just as deeply, possibly more practically, and which I have been meaning to write about for a long time. I am talking about television. Specifically, I am talking about five series that each did something I had never seen done before, something I have been trying to do in prose ever since, and which collectively constitute a graduate seminar in serialized storytelling that I attended for free while sitting on various couches eating various snacks.

In the interest of completeness — and because the magpie nest is only useful if you can actually see all the pieces in it — here they are.

Doctor Who: The Philosophy of Showing Up

I need to specify which Doctor Who we're talking about, because the classic series and the 2005 revival are related the way a caterpillar and a butterfly are related — same DNA, radically different organism. The show I mean, the one that crawled inside my head and rearranged the furniture, is Russell T Davies's resurrection and its immediate successor under Steven Moffat. Specifically, I mean the Ninth and Tenth Doctor eras, and I mean the episodes that were brave enough to be genuinely strange.

What Doctor Who taught me is something I think of as the philosophy of showing up. The Doctor is not, at his core, a hero in any traditional sense. He doesn't have a mission. He doesn't have a mandate. He has a box that goes anywhere in time and space, and he has a constitutional inability to look away from suffering, and the combination of those two things produces — across however many centuries he's been at it — something that functions like heroism without being architected like it. He doesn't save the world because he's the Chosen One. He saves the world because he happened to be there, and he gave a damn, and it turned out that giving a damn, consistently, over a long enough timeline, amounts to something.

That is a philosophy I have tried to build into every protagonist I've ever written. The chosen-one structure has always felt like a cheat to me — the universe deciding in advance that this particular person matters. What I find more interesting, and more true, is the person who matters because they decided to. Because they showed up when they didn't have to and kept showing up even when it cost them. The Doctor loses everything, over and over, with a regularity that would break anyone who wasn't constitutionally incapable of stopping, and he keeps going anyway. That is not a power fantasy. That is something much more useful: an argument that persistence in the face of loss is its own form of grace.

The specific craft lesson is: let your characters be defined by what they do in the dark. When there's no audience, when there's no reward, when the sensible thing is to walk away — what does your character do then? The Doctor always goes back. Always. That single behavioral fact does more characterization work than any amount of backstory.

Also, and I say this with complete seriousness: the episode 'Blink' is a masterclass in how to generate dread from a simple rule, and I have studied it the way a musician studies a perfect chord progression. Know your monster's one law. Build everything else around it. Watch the audience never feel safe again.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster as Mirror

Joss Whedon's relationship with his own legacy is complicated and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The critical reassessment of Whedon-the-person has been thorough and is largely deserved. What I can say, separately and without contradiction, is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a text — as a piece of serialized storytelling — is one of the most formally ambitious things American television produced in the nineties, and it taught me things about metaphor and consequence and the specific grammar of genre that I am still unpacking.

The central innovation of Buffy is so obvious in retrospect that it's easy to underestimate how radical it was at the time: the monsters are always about something. Not in the lazy allegorical sense where the werewolf is a stand-in for puberty and you're meant to nod sagely at the subtext. In the specific, earned, emotionally precise sense where the external horror is the internal horror made physical, made real, made killable — and sometimes, heartbreakingly, not killable at all.

The vampire who loses his soul the morning after sex is not an allegory. It is a story about a real thing — the specific terror of intimacy, of giving yourself to someone and watching them become someone you don't recognize — rendered in a form that gives you permission to feel it at full volume. Genre fiction's great secret is that the costumes are load-bearing. The dragon and the vampire and the alien are not decorations on top of the real story. They are the real story, accessed through a door that realism can't quite reach.

Every monster in my fiction is trying to do this. Every supernatural element is trying to earn its keep by being about something, by externalizing something interior that would be too raw or too abstract to approach head-on. When I write a character whose grief manifests as something literal and dangerous in the world, I am writing in the grammar Buffy taught me. The monster is the mirror. The monster is always the mirror.

The other thing — the craft lesson that I think about constantly — is what the show did with consequence. Buffy understood that episodic television's great structural weakness is the reset button: every week, the status quo is restored, and nothing that happened last week truly matters. The show's answer to this was to make consequence cumulative and irreversible. Characters died and stayed dead. Relationships broke in ways that didn't fully heal. The characters aged, visibly, in ways that mattered to the story. Season Six is famously brutal and famously divisive, and it is also the show running the consequence engine at full power, refusing the comfort of resolution, insisting that some things you do to yourself and others you cannot simply walk back. I learned from that season that protecting your characters from the full weight of their choices is a form of condescension toward your readers.

Babylon 5: The Architecture of the Long Game

J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of Babylon 5's 110 episodes himself. By himself. One person. If you are a writer and that fact does not make you feel some complicated combination of awe and inadequacy and deep professional respect, please check your pulse.

But the volume of output is not the lesson. The lesson is what he was building with it. Babylon 5 was, to my knowledge, the first American television series to be conceived from the beginning as a single, complete, five-year novel. Not a series of episodes that happened to share characters and a setting. A novel, with a first act and a second act and a third act and foreshadowing planted in season one that paid off in season four. Straczynski knew, before he filmed a single frame, where it was going and what it meant. The structure was not improvised. The structure was built.

What this produces — the thing that hit me like a physical force the first time I watched the whole series through — is a specific kind of narrative resonance that episodic storytelling almost never achieves. Small scenes in early episodes take on retroactive weight once you know what they mean. Characters who seem peripheral become load-bearing. Throwaway lines of dialogue reveal themselves, three seasons later, to have been precise instruments, placed exactly where they needed to be. The whole thing rewards the investment, not just emotionally but intellectually — the pleasure of watching the architecture reveal itself is one of the most specifically literary pleasures I have ever gotten from a screen.

Babylon 5 is why I write novels instead of short stories. It is why I think in terms of five-act structures and long arcs and planted seeds. It is why I believe, with the conviction of someone who has seen it work, that the long game is worth playing — that the patience required to let a story breathe and develop and eventually converge is repaid to the reader at compound interest. Straczynski proved that you could build something with that kind of ambition in a popular medium and have it land. That proof changed what I thought was possible.

The specific craft lesson: know your ending before you write your beginning. Not because the story can't surprise you along the way — it will, and it should — but because the ending determines what everything else means. You can't plant foreshadowing if you don't know what you're foreshadowing. You can't build thematic coherence without knowing what theme you're being coherent about. Babylon 5 is five years of Straczynski knowing exactly what he was building and trusting, against considerable industry pressure to the contrary, that the audience would stay with him long enough to see it finished.

Fringe: The Emotional Logic of the Impossible

Fringe is underseen and undervalued and I am constitutionally incapable of letting that stand without comment.

On the surface, Fringe is an X-Files successor — government agents investigating the weird and the impossible, a mythology arc threading through procedural episodes, a will-they-won't-they at the center. What it does that the X-Files never quite managed is make the mythology personal. The conspiracy at the heart of Fringe is not about alien colonization or shadow governments in any abstract sense. It is about a father who watched his son die and made a decision that fractured reality itself rather than accept that loss. Walter Bishop broke the universe out of grief, and everything that follows — every monster-of-the-week, every parallel world, every Observer incursion — is the long consequence of that single act of desperate, irrational love.

This is the lesson I took from Fringe and have never stopped applying: the impossible must have emotional logic. The science fiction premise, the fantasy element, the supernatural intrusion — whatever it is — must be rooted in something recognizably, achingly human. Walter didn't fracture the universe because of a power struggle or a political agenda. He fractured it because he could not watch his son die. Every parent in the audience understood that instantly. The universe-fracturing was just the specific form his unbearable grief took, given access to the tools of fringe science.

When your impossible thing has emotional logic — when the reader can trace a clear line from a recognizable human feeling to the extraordinary event — the audience accepts it completely, without the friction that usually accompanies asking people to suspend disbelief. You're not asking them to believe in parallel universes. You're asking them to believe in a father's grief. They already believe in that. The parallel universes are just where the grief lives.

Fringe also gave me John Noble's Walter Bishop, who is one of the great characters in television history and proof that you can have a character be simultaneously the villain of their own backstory and the heart of the present-day narrative without those two things canceling each other out. Walter did something unforgivable. Walter is also the person you most want to save. Both of those things are true at once, and the show holds them in productive tension for five seasons without flinching. I think about Walter every time I write a character who has done something they cannot fully atone for.

Farscape: The Alien as Emotional Amplifier

Farscape is the show that broke my brain in the most productive way possible, and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give.

The premise sounds manageable: American astronaut gets sucked through a wormhole, ends up on a living ship in a distant part of the galaxy with a crew of alien fugitives. Fine. Standard. Space opera by way of the Muppets, given that the Henson Company built a significant portion of the cast. Eccentric but not unprecedented.

What Farscape does with that premise — what it does within the first two seasons and then with accelerating, almost reckless ambition from there — is use the alienness of its setting as an emotional amplifier of extraordinary power. Because the characters are not human, because they come from cultures and physiologies and histories that have nothing to do with Earth, the show can take emotional states to extremes that a realistic drama would never survive. A character's grief doesn't just make them sad. It causes a physical transformation. A relationship doesn't just become strained. It breaks across species lines in ways that require total reinvention of what intimacy even means. The external strangeness gives the internal experience room to breathe at a scale that realism could never accommodate.

John Crichton — the human at the center of it, and one of the most psychologically complex protagonists in science fiction — spends the series being systematically taken apart and rebuilt, over and over, by a universe that has no framework for him and no obligation to be gentle. By the end of the run he is barely recognizable as the man who fell through the wormhole in the pilot, and that transformation is earned in a way that few long-running series ever manage because the show never protected him from consequences. Crichton breaks. Crichton loses his mind, briefly, more than once. Crichton does things the hero is not supposed to do. And the show keeps watching, without judgment, because the show understands that being a person in an impossible situation means you become impossible yourself, at least for a while.

The craft lesson from Farscape is one I return to constantly: use the genre to go further than realism allows. When you're working in fantasy or science fiction or horror, you have access to emotional registers that literary realism has to earn through extreme stylization. The alien landscape, the impossible biology, the physics-defying technology — these are not limitations on your story's emotional range. They are extensions of it. They let you dramatize interior states that have no realistic external correlative. If a character's world is literally fracturing around them, you don't have to find a subtle way to show that they're coming apart inside.

Farscape gave me full permission to be baroque. To be excessive. To push the emotional volume to eleven and trust that the audience would not break under the pressure, because the genre had prepared them for it. That permission is woven into every page of everything I've written since.

What Television Adds to the Orchestra

Books taught me voice. Music taught me rhythm and scale and the courage of total commitment. Film taught me image as argument. What television — these five series specifically — taught me is something distinct from all of those: it taught me time.

Long-form serialized storytelling is the only narrative medium that has time as a genuine structural element. A novel, no matter how long, is consumed in a compressed burst relative to its internal timeline. A film is two hours. But a television series that runs five or six years, watched in real time by its audience, does something no other medium can replicate: it ages with you. You watch the characters grow and fail and lose things and rebuild over literal years of your own life, and by the time it ends, the story has become part of your own timeline in a way that feels different from anything else.

Babylon 5 began airing when I was young enough to absorb its lessons about structure before I had the vocabulary to name what I was learning. Buffy ran through years that shaped who I am. The Doctor and his box have been a periodic presence in my imaginative life across enough of my life to qualify as a friendship. These are not neutral aesthetic influences. They are part of the furniture of my interior world, and the fiction I write is, in some irreducible sense, furniture built from the same wood.

The orchestra was never just books and music and film. It was always these too: the shows that asked me, week after week, to show up and care about something serialized and strange and stubbornly unwilling to make things easy. If you've read anything I've written and found it long, and complicated, and deeply invested in the specific weight of things that happened chapters ago finally paying off — now you know why.

The magpie nest keeps growing. I don't expect it to stop.