Writers who have inspired me

I remember the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig being asked about his influences during an interview. He came out with a neat rejoinder: 'I prefer the word theft'. Since I heard him say that I've felt a bit reluctant to own up to my influences, but of course influence does happen and sometimes it is important. However, it has always been a complicated issue for me. It's easy to reel off a few names of writers I've read and admired and even, as a young writer, tried to imitate, but that isn't necessarily telling the whole story. Influences begin very early, I think, and at primary school I think I had my first real experience of the magic of poetry when the teacher read The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning. It's a wonderfully rich narrative poem which has stayed with me, and I still read it every so often.

As a young boy my idea of literature was strongly defined by some of the books my father had in the house, some of which I read - books by Edgar Allan Poe, Shelley, Byron, Upton Sinclair, Robert Tressal, John Steinbeck and others. At school, I had a particularly good English teacher who encouraged me to write. He opened my eyes to the power and relevance of poetry - in particular, I remember being completely bowled over by Peter Porter's Your Attention Please. Here was a poem in the form of a radio broadcast announcing that there was about to be a nuclear war, and I had read nothing like it and hadn't realised that poetry could do such a thing. Later, as a young writer, I certainly came under the spell of some great writers, and even learnt something from trying to write my own pastiche. With Chekhov, of course, this didn't work. I realised his stories were great works, but they were impossible to imitate or parody. They appeared to have no discernible style, no linguistic quirks or flourishes to imitate. Later again, I realised that one of the things which makes them great is inimitable: his insight into human motivation and relationships, which is something you have to acquire the hard way. Nevertheless, reading Checkhov made me see what a great thing a short story could be at its best, and so it made me want to write my own short stories.

In poetry, like a lot of poets of my generation in Scotland, I came under the very valuable influences of Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan, not that I tried to write like either, but in a more general way - from MacCaig I took the importance of simplicity and lucidity, from Morgan it was more to do with versatility - his work demonstrated to me that anything can be addressed in poetry and that poetry can take all sorts of forms.

The other kind of influence I've felt is more like what MacCaig called theft - simply learning particular things about the craft from reading other writers. I think there are so many writers I've benefited from in this way, but in terms of my short story writing I think I perhaps learnt most from Bernard Malamud, a writer from a completely different background and culture than mine. His stories taught me many things, the most obvious being how to present a very subjective point of view within an ostensibly third person narration, working a character's speech and thought patterns into the texture of the narrative itself.

In poetry, I think I was influenced quite early on by some Eastern European poets - Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Vasco Poppa. It was the directness and simplicity of their poems, coupled with something quite daringly inventive in terms of the poem's argument, which appealed to me and gave my own poetry a strong direction at an important point in my development as a writer.

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