Photo: Mike Anderson / RedDoorStudio.com

Through the novels of Andrew Vachss, I’ve learned a new meanings for brother, sister, mother, father, and most important — family.

Basic Writing was supposed to strike fear into my heart. Instead, it brought the world into relief.

When I attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the school’s curriculum required all freshmen to take a class called Basic Writing. Known as a weed-out course, the class was reputed to be one of the most challenging at Medill. And it was challenging, but it was challenging in the best way possible – you had too much fun to realize how hard you were working.

After reading the first few hundred pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, my friend Jordan Byrne asked me what I thought of it. Despite the novel’s incredible scope and dazzling prose, I only said these four words in response:

“It’s filled with joy.”

There are specific elements of Stephenson’s writing that I aspire to emulate in my own, but more than anything else, I try to write with the same joy that he does. Let me explain:

It might seem unusual to list Richard Adams as an influence, seeing as how I’ve only read one of his books – but what a book.

For the uninitiated, Watership Down is The Aeneid in the animal kingdom. When the incursion of an industrial development forces a tribe of rabbits from their home, they must set out to find a new one. Along the way, they have a series of breathtaking adventures across the English countryside, all of it against the backdrop of Adams’ brilliant world-building.

Yes, world-building. Even though it takes place on modern-day earth, Watership Down stands as one of the best pieces of speculative fiction I’ve ever read. Adams invents an entire culture, vocabulary, social-structure and – most wonderfully – a mythology for his rabbits.