It's generally a bad idea to set out to "sound like" a specific writer or consciously ape their style, that said I think everyone has a goal they're striving for and writers who inform their style. Given that my novel is a fictionalized memoir that prominently features sports- ideally, I'd be totally thrilled if it read something like Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch", Will Leitch's "Are we winning?" and Richard Roeper's "Sox and the City". But I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the works of Charles Bukowski in general or Sherman Alexie's "Absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian" as goals to strive for in writing semi-autobiographical fiction. I think the latter is brilliant in finding the common ground between universal aspects of the experience of being a teenage boy and his personal experience growing up in dire poverty as a Native American living on a reservation (and facing the prejudice of later attending an all-white school).
Hopefully, this post didn't come out too convoluted. If I could sum it up in a sentence- I'd ask what book would you ideally like your novel to be compared to?
~Steve
----------2010: An October Story
2009: $11/hr (Only made it to 9,000 words)
2008: Suburban Trash (Won with over 50,000 words, but project abandoned)
50,271 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2010 - 00 10
Um, that's a tough one. My favorite authors come from a wide range of genres from J.K. Rowling to Nicholas Sparks to Avi. I think my first novel (the one I'm not writing for this) would probably be compared to "The Pinballs" by Betsy Byars, "Home, Trees and Other Big, Fat Lies" by Jill Wolfson, "Touching Spirit Bear" by Ben Mikealson and "Time for Andrew" by Mary Downing Hahn.
The second (the one I'm writing now for this contest) probably would be most like is "The Girl Who Threw Butterflies" by Mick Cochrane and "The Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings" by Alan Gratz.
These books all touch on topics I'm interested in--adoption, history, foster homes, discovering yourself and family. Every book I have ever read has influenced me in some way or another and made me the writer I am today. I am thankful for each and every one of the books I've witnessed from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" and Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" to Sparks's "The Notebook" and "Where the Heart Is" by Billie Letts.
I only hope I can be half as good at telling my stories as they are at telling theirs.