Rick Goldsmith

After working for some ten months on my novel I attended an online ‘Advanced Fiction’ course run by the National Centre For Writing. I’ve already said this, but I’d heartily recommend them. Their pricing is reasonable and they work hard to make sure you get your money’s worth. I signed onto the course as I desperately needed some eyes on the work I’d been doing. I’d got to the point where I didn’t know if I was wasting my time or whether I’d be chucked of the course (good old impostor syndrome).

A very vibrant group
After a couple of sessions led by Ian Nettleton I felt quite at home, getting good feedback from our very vibrant international group and the online forum was a dream. One of our earliest exercises got us considering our writerly influences. As with all lists, the omissions are too numerous to contemplate but I spent a few pleasurable few hours flicking through these writers’ books recalling how they’d galvanised me or had me sat up at six in the morning or late into the night or made my brain fizz with ideas or helped me feel recognised, known, a feeling of deeply valuable kinship.

Here’s my list
Early influences: Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Marvel comics, Peter Schaffer’s ‘Equus’, William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and The Beatles.

My touchstones: John Berger, Raine Maria Rilke and Gary Snyder.

Old favourites: Samuel Beckett (especially ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ with Patrick Magee), Raymond Carver (prose and poetry), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Frances Horovitz, James Joyce, Hanif Kureshi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, JD Salinger, and Dylan Thomas.

More recent favourites: Sebastian Barry, Douglas Coupland, Rachel Cusk, Charles Dickens, Geoff Dyer, Elena Ferrante, Milan Kundera, Elmore Leonard, Richard Powers, Sally Rooney ( you got to love ‘Intermezzo’), Edward St Aubyn, WG Sebald, Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler and Stefan Zweig.

I even jotted down the influences on the book: Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami, Sigrid Nunez and Donna Tartt.

And that’s without including any film-makers, musicians (hardly) or visual artists or dancers or thinkers or actors or tutors etc etc etc.