INFLUENCES: Finding My Own Voice by MATT WESOLOWSKI

Name: MATT WESOLOWSKI Author of: SIX STORIES (2017) On Twitter: ConcreteKraken

It’s taken me years to find my own voice.

I’ve spent the majority of my writing life mimicking; from a bargain-bin Enid Blyton when I was a kid, a teenage cut-price James Herbert to a snide Stephen King or else 50% off all Lovecraft, eldritch savings that will loose the trappings of your puny earthly ideals of sanity!

It’s only been in the last 5 or 6 years that I’ve felt my own writing voice has really emerged. I imagine this must be fairly common; as writers, we’d love to think we’re true mavericks but in reality we have no choice but to climb the shoulders of the literary giants that have strode the land before us. I am not ashamed of this mimicry and even now, I’ll turn a phrase that sounds Lovecraftian, or King-ish and that’s ok.

I do feel like I am still learning my craft, that my voice is still evolving, changing, synchronising a little with every good book I read. It is as the great man himself says

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King.

Without reading, and reading widely, I feel like I just cannot write with any degree of integrity; it feels like a day without a cup of tea (tantamount to criminality in my opinion.). When a book hits me where it hurts, its language sinking and dissolving inside your brain like linguistic effervescence, it raises the bar, galvanises me to strive to that level of quality.

When I started writing my first tentative short stories as a just-teenager, James Herbert and Clive Barker’s mastery descriptions of the grotesque were revelatory. Back then I read little else but horror, forever trying to slide the fear in between the words like these masters, their stories underpinned by longing, love, things I was not mature enough to fathom…most girls didn’t like long-haired oddballs who wore black nail varnish and wrote stories back then…

Then in my late teens I discovered the work of Jon King – ‘The Football Factory’, the subject perhaps not befitting of a teenage goth, yet the sheer command of language astounded me and showed me a new way of writing, stream-of-consciousness brutality that enveloped me utterly. I longed for more like this and found the work of Kevin Sampson – ‘Awaydays’ was both savage and beautiful and Niall Griffiths whose ‘Grits’ and ‘Kelly and Victor’ still haunt me today.

Through my 20s, I read all of Stephen King’s back catalogue, everything by Lovecraft (I was a latecomer to Cthulhu) and now as I read more (and much more expansively), every book that does something to me emotionally, helps weave another thread into the voice that has emerged from inside. Lauren Beukes and Yrsa Sigurðadottir were more of those revelatory writers that pushed at genre conventions; straddling the places between crime and the supernatural and gave me a galvanic push to try the same.

Karen Sullivan, the phenomenon behind Orenda Books guided me to more of the Nordic noir, namely Kati Hiekkapelto and Antti Tuomainen whose work had a profound influence on my own. Like their Scandinavian neighbours, the Finns have a way with words that I cannot put my finger on; something to do with telling it simply, yet with profound poetry hanging from every phrase.

I feel like my own voice, my influences are in a constant state of flux; I just recently read ‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline and ‘Girls on Fire’ by Robin Wasserman…writing is often a difficult pursuit, there are times when you feel a little hollow and word-weary yet reading the above titles were like bellows to the flames.

I guess influences don’t stop, as much as learning doesn’t stop. I can’t wait to see what inspires me next!