Books that changed how we write

Let's do something fun. One book each that fundamentally changed how you approach your own writing. I'll start: Beloved by Toni Morrison. It taught me that historical trauma can be rendered in language that's both precise and mythic.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. The way she uses landscape as interiority broke something open in my brain. After reading it I stopped being afraid of slow sentences.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm. The opening line — 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.' It taught me that nonfiction has to interrogate itself.

Neruda's Canto General. It showed me that poetry could hold an entire continent. After that I stopped writing small.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro. 1,300 pages and I've read it three times. It taught me that research is not a phase — it's the whole thing. The story lives in the details.

I love that our answers are so different. Five writers, five completely different literary DNA. This is why writing groups work — collision of influences produces something new.