………………………… marcus tullius cicero (⸝⸝๑﹏๑⸝⸝) i want to say it’s a bunch of different writers (and of course it is, maybe not even writers alone; i know i’m like a sponge in the weeks leading up to when i lock in and write something dedicatedly, but that kinda means it differs from work to work and not necessarily representative of my writing “style” as a broader voice, whatever that even means) but in my heart of hearts i know you can tell the exact point my writing style changed pre- and post-a phd seminar my prof threw me into where i was forced to read in verrem near exclusively for a year nonstop ;;

maybe it’s not fair to only credit cicero, though. it’s probably really just latin as a whole. i had a brief stint in journalism around the same time, too, and i think… together with latin + studying linguistics + me not writing fiction for years in that period, it all just kind of rewired my brain a little. or at least it gave me a way to reframe how i think about language and embrace that the most natural way of writing for me is to do so almost... mathematically? structurally? it’s like building an answer to a long formula, almost. i found that i especially like the step-by-step tedium of putting words down word for word, and you generally learn latin in a way that directly engages with and challenges that.

i don’t think i’m a ✨ beautiful ✨ or particularly poetic writer (not self-deprecation!) and i always say that if i were a cook, i’d be someone who likes to work with good ingredients above all. and maybe latin didn’t give me style, per se, but it definitely informed my sentence architecture and internal metronome… and what is voice if not that, tbh. where the weight of a clause sits, when a sentence should tighten or release, how long you can suspend an idea before resolving it. if you read my teenage hq fics, they were very concerned with images, with beauty in the words instead of the content, and i was terribly disgusted with them despite readers telling me otherwise; i think i’ve learned to love the way i manage depth and density a lot more thanks to cicero.

i’ve maybe also spoken a bit about salinger being a formative experience for me, but that’s less for his prose than for his approach to characterization. it’s really very unfortunate haha but i remember reading him as a teenager and just having my mind completely blown by the honesty (?) of his characters. not even bc they were brutally confessional (though many of them are lol), but bc they felt... lived in. you really get to appreciate just how much when you read salinger’s short stories. everything was filtered through who they were: the words that bubble up, the words they swallow back, the things they notice without realizing they’re noticing them. a character isn’t a personality you assign to them; it’s the relationships you yourself build for them, the people you arrange around them to shape their life, the media they’ve read and watched, the stories they tell themselves and others and how, the tiny memories that keep resurfacing for reasons they can’t quite explain. it’s you getting to know them less through what they say than through how they see the world under your hands. if there was ever a part of me that was in danger of writing characters who thought in fact, i think salinger stopped that before it could blossom and taught me that it’s more fun to write characters who think in associations, who reveal the shape of themselves by what their minds naturally return to.

but. yeah. this is an extremely narrow pair to answer with, but… idk. i write against and to and for my internal compass. how that compass was built is, as you said, is not the work of a single author. if anything, the compass has probably been broken and repaired and broken and repaired so many times that it might not even be pointing where it says it is. but i know what feels good in what i read and write. and i know which star i personally call polaris in a given journey.

my deepest sincerest apologies for taking months to answer, and i hope these summer months are treating you well <3