Follow the Leader(s)

I've been away from this blog for several months now. Truth be told, I just haven't known what to write about and then impostor syndrome hit and it hit hard. Like "If I don't know what to write about, am I faking my interest in writing?" type of hard. The recurring idea that has kept coming back to me about how I could go about reviving this little corner of my writing identity, the L.E. Leon part of my personality, was to share the list of the authors whose writings inspired me to pick up the pen and make my own inky footprints for future generations to follow in...hopefully! :)

J.R.R. Tolkien

CAMERA PRESS/Bill Potter

Okay, I think that anyone who has known me since middle school has probably heard of my love for this literary giant at some point. I first got introduced to his writings when I was 12 years old. Reading the Lord of the Rings was a requirement in my family to be able to watch the film adaptations, so that was what I did over Christmas break that year. I fell in love with the books so much that I ended up reading them cover-to-cover not just once or twice that year. Nope, in the space of 365 days, I read the Lord of the Rings a whopping 10 times. Remember, I was in middle school and homeschooled, so I had time to burn. It was Tolkien's use of his initials, J.R.R., which inspired me to write under the name of L.E. Leon. There's something aboout using my initials rather than my given name makes my authorial pursuits more reachable in my mind. There's another aspect of Tolkien that has made me a life-long fan of his. He invented the grammar and vocabulary of at least 15 different Elvish dialects and had many other languages and dialects that were not fully completed at his death in September 1973 (see this Wikipedia article for more info). I have an intense love for words, but compared to Tolkien, I look like I have a severe disinterest in them! If I ever get the chance to visit England, I want to make a stop at his house and stand in the room where he wrote his books, if he had a particular room for his writing. In my mind, Tolkien is a literary giant and were it not for his writings, I might not have turned to writing myself.

William Shakespeare

I haven't liked William Shakespeare nearly as long as I have Tolkien. In fact, if I had gone with the idea of composing this post in the order of how long I've enjoyed the different writers' literary influences, Shakespeare would be at the very bottom of the list. When I was in high school, I had a terrible first introduction to the Bard's plays, because I read the No Fear Shakespeare editions. My impression of Romeo and Juliet was that it was the most boring piece of literature I'd ever encountered and I did not think that William Shakespeare deserved the accolades that have been bestowed upon him by historians and literary scholars in the centuries following his death. This is the opinion I held to going into my sophomore year of college, when I took the Shakespeare class I was required to take for my then-minor in English. I was taking the class solely to get the distasteful task over with. To make a long story short, the professor of that class taught it in such a way that I quickly learned that the original Shakespearean English can be understood and enjoyed rather than feared. I realized that Shakespeare purposefully used specific words to evoke certain emotions and to make his readers think about was being described in the text or portrayed on-stage. Because I see this desire in myself, it makes sense why I was drawn to Shakespeare's writing (eventually, of course!). I felt a respect and literary cameraderie with a playwright who has been dead for over 400 years.

Wikipedia/The Chandos portrait, held by the National Portrait Gallery, London

Louisa May Alcott

Wikipedia

If I had to sum up what I've read of Louisa May Alcott's writings in one word, I would choose "comfort". For me, reading Alcott's stories is like being drawn into a small world, which seems in some ways to be so different from the world we live in now, but so similar to it in other ways. There's no dragons to be fought or heroes meeting their deaths upon a blackened battlefield within the pages of the Little Women trilogy or the Eight Cousins duology, just simple lives being ever so slightly romanticized. It is this aspect of Alcott's writing that has influenced my own the most. I've never written a story about my own life, but there have many instances in which I've integrated tidbits from my own life into my otherwise fictional story Another side of L.M. Alcott's writings which resonate deeply with me is the feeling I get of walking through the stories as a passerby on my way to other stories. I am given the privilege to sojourn with the characters in those stories for a time, but as Alcott writes at the end of Jo's Boys , there comes a time when we need to "let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family" (Alcott n.p.). It's a beautiful thing to take in a story and enjoy it for all its worth, but as Alcott taught me, it's also a beautiful thing to end a story and go on to others.

Robert Frost

And now we come to the only poet on this list. Yes, I'm aware that the other authors in this post all wrote poetry of their own. However, if you noticed, I said nothing about their poetry, but rather focused on the impact of their stories on my writing. In fact, the only reason that Tolkien's poem "The Road Goes Ever On and On" is on the list of my favorite poems is because it reminds me of Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken". I think it's because they both center around roads and journeys. After that, I admit that the similarities end, because Tolkien's poem anticipates a journey that must be undertaken and Frost's poem laments the fact that he had to choose between two paths and journeys and he asks what would've happened if he took the road he did not take. I love Frost's writing for his calm voice and his way of asking the big questions of life in a beautiful but plain fashion. Again, like Louisa May Alcott, Robert Frost did not write about high adventure, and yet, I find myself coming back to his writing and finding a sweet comfort in it.

Wikipedia

Closing Thoughts

The writers above are the ones that have influenced how I write when I put pen to the paper or my fingers to my laptop keyboard. Naturally, they are also some of my favorite writers as well. However, this post was never meant to spill my literary guts on every single writer I love. If I did that, the list would be much longer and reveal the extent of my love for British literature. I can state with certainty that the only thing that would remain the same from this post is that I would write about J.R.R. Tolkien and Willliam Shakespeare before all the others. Maybe someday I will undertake that blog post, but until then or my next blog post, I wish you happy literary journeys whether they are reading or writing!

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