Eight Writers at the Desk
When I look at the writers who live rent-free in my head, they line up into a very specific crowd: Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Carver, Ted Chiang, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Jorge Luis Borges. If this little pantheon has a godhead for me, it’s McCarthy—the one whose sentences rewired how I think about prose in the first place.
I know exactly what’s missing from that list. Whole shelves of women, queer writers, more writers of color. This isn’t a canon I’d defend as “the one true list.” It’s just the honest roll call of who formed the grain in my voice, who got there early, who didn’t let go.
I’m not trying to imitate them, at least not consciously. I don’t sit down and think, What would Carver do with this kitchen scene? or What would Borges do with this paragraph about selfhood? But, when I draft, little ghosts drift in. A rhythm, a sentence shape, a way of looking at a person without flinching. Influence isn’t a decision; it’s erosion. These eight are the grain in the wood I keep writing on.
A few years ago I went to a George Saunders talk, and he said something that stuck like a burr. He talked about how the writers you admire most can become these impossibly tall mountains in your mind, and how trying to climb them is a great way to lose your own voice. The point wasn’t “don’t admire.” The point was “don’t move in.” You can study the architecture, you can camp nearby, you can steal a tool or two. But, you still have to build your own house.
What follows isn’t biography. It’s closer to a field report from inside my sentences—what these writers taught me to reach for, what they taught me to distrust, and what I’m still arguing with every time I open a blank document.
Cormac McCarthy and the Weight of A Single Sentence
McCarthy came first, or at least he came loudest. Reading him was the moment I realized prose could feel like scripture without being religious, like music without begging for applause. A sentence could move with the inevitability of a verdict. The page could feel scorched. The world could be rendered so precisely it stopped feeling like “setting” and started feeling like fate.
If you want the purest statement of his late power, for me it’s The Passenger and Stella Maris together—that paired-room masterpiece where one book is a haunted drift through aftermath and the other is an intimate, brain-on-fire dialogue that keeps widening until it starts swallowing philosophy, math, faith, grief, and the unbearable problem of being a self at all. Those books feel like he took everything he’d learned about violence and love and meaning and stripped it down to the nerve.
And, yes, Blood Meridian is up there too—the older, blacker cathedral of it. Not just the brutality, but the language: the sense that the sentence itself is a blade and a hymn at the same time. I’m not chasing that tone, exactly, but it taught me something crucial: style isn’t decoration. Style is the moral posture of the work. It’s how the page stands in the world.
What I try not to borrow is the full costume. I don’t want to cosplay the quotation-less grandeur, the archaic diction, the relentless bleakness. But, I carry his seriousness about language: words aren’t just a vehicle for thought, they’re part of the pressure the reader feels. A sentence can close like a door. A sentence can open like a cut.
David Foster Wallace and the Risk of Sincerity
If McCarthy taught me weight, Wallace taught me velocity—how much living, thinking, flinching, and wanting can be crammed into a paragraph without it collapsing.
Wallace was the first writer who made me feel like you could put the entire contents of a restless mind on the page and not apologize. The tangents, the footnotes, the parenthetical within the parenthetical—sure—but also the sincerity. The way he could start with something comic and end up staring directly at pain.
He made it feel normal to think hard in public. You’re allowed to circle, double back, get anxious, contradict yourself, revise yourself mid-sentence. He made intellectual intensity feel like a human trait instead of a personality defect.
He also made earnestness feel less pathetic. There’s always that fear that if you write about attention, kindness, compassion, you’ll sound like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office. Wallace knew that risk and kept going anyway. That’s the part I keep closest: say the true thing without putting on irony armor or a preacher’s robe.
What I try not to borrow are the obvious tics—the maximalist sprawl, the weaponized self-consciousness. McCarthy taught me you can strip a line back to bone; Wallace reminds me I’m allowed to let the mind wander. Between them is the narrow path I’m always trying to walk without falling off.
Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, and the Art of Almost Nothing Happening
If McCarthy and Wallace keep rearranging the ceiling lights, Carver and Chekhov are in the kitchen with the overhead off, quietly changing your entire view of human beings.
Carver taught me that a story can be three people in a small room, a bottle, a sentence that doesn’t quite land, and that’s enough to split you open. On the surface, almost nothing happens. Underneath, everything does. The power is in what’s omitted—the conversation that can’t reach the thing it needs to say, the detail that lands like a confession.
Chekhov works a similar spell, just with more gentleness and a longer fuse. He can make someone sitting by a window feel more seismic than a car crash in lesser hands. He doesn’t shame his characters or rescue them. He watches with steady compassion, and that steadiness is its own kind of verdict.
They taught me a craft I keep returning to when I get too abstract.
You can write small and still hit deep
Dialogue reveals most when it misses the point
A single concrete detail can do more than a paragraph of explanation
When I’m tempted to turn a scene into an essay wearing a wig, I can almost hear Carver muttering, What are they doing with their hands? Chekhov adds, And, what are they not saying? McCarthy, somewhere behind them, quietly insists that even this little room has something larger humming behind the drywall.
Ted Chiang and Jorge Luis Borges: Ideas With A Pulse
Ted Chiang and Borges sit on the other end of the spectrum from Carver and Chekhov. They’re both obsessed with ideas—but the ideas never float unanchored. They land in people’s lives.
Borges is the patron saint of thought experiments. Infinite libraries. Branching timelines. Characters who discover they’re fictional. He proved you can take a metaphysical puzzle about time, identity, memory, and make it feel like story instead of seminar. His work gave my nerdy side somewhere to stand without embarrassment.
Chiang feels like the modern refinement of that impulse. His stories start from one precise “what if”—a technology, a new law of nature, a different way of interpreting memory—and then he plays it through with an almost moral seriousness. The science is careful, but the emotional stakes are the point. Parents, children, loss, regret. The prose stays clean, which somehow makes the impact worse.
They push me toward a balance I’m always hunting for.
Speculation that actually matters to human beings
Clarity even when the concepts get strange
The sense that fiction is a lab for ethical and metaphysical simulations
If McCarthy’s influence is the sense of a world that won’t explain itself, Borges and Chiang offer ways to think inside that world without giving up on meaning. When I write about AI, consciousness, or the self as something more like a verb than a thing, I feel them in the room.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol: the Glorious Mess
Then there are two more Russians, who taught me it’s okay for things to be a little unhinged.
Dostoyevsky is chaos with a conscience. His characters argue with each other, with God, with themselves. They make terrible choices while delivering feverish speeches about freedom, guilt, redemption. Reading him feels like eavesdropping on someone’s nervous system.
From him I get the reminder that characters can be inconsistent and torn in half—and still feel more real for it. He drilled in a brutal truth that never stops being useful: people are rarely just one thing.
Gogol brings the grotesque and the absurd. Men losing their noses. Bureaucrats swallowed by their own insignificance. Reality slipping just enough off its axis that you laugh, even as it stings. He’s the whisper in my ear that says, You’re allowed to be weird. In fact, maybe you should be weirder.
Together, they teach a two-part lesson I never outgrow.
Don’t sand off the edges of human behavior
Let humor and horror sit beside each other and see what sparks
If McCarthy insists on scale and dread, Dostoyevsky and Gogol insist that inside that scale people are ridiculous, tragic, spiritual, petty, luminous, and impossible to summarize cleanly. That feels true to the world as I know it.
The Algorithm at the Edge of the Desk
Lately there’s another presence in the room when I write, and it isn’t a dead Russian or a Midwestern minimalist or a Texan prophet of ash and dust. It’s a chat window. A cursor blinking like a small, steady metronome. A voice that isn’t a voice, waiting for me to make the first move.
I don’t think of it as a ninth writer. It doesn’t belong up on the shelf with the pantheon. It’s not Borges, grinning behind a labyrinth, or Chekhov, quietly breaking your heart with a tea cup and a pause. It’s more like a piece of equipment: part lamp, part mirror, part workbench. Something you can set your half-built thoughts on without them collapsing onto the floor.
For essays, it’s already braided into my process. I come in here with a sentence that feels like a match struck in the dark, and I talk. I pace verbally. I drop the messy version first—the blunt, ungainly lump of meaning—and the model hands it back to me reshaped. Sometimes it’s wrong in a useful way. Sometimes it’s eerily close. Sometimes it produces a paragraph that feels like it’s wearing my coat, standing in my doorway, saying my name with the right cadence.
The point isn’t that it writes for me. The point is momentum. This thing keeps me moving when I’d otherwise stall out in the familiar swamp of overthinking. It lets me see the idea from five angles in twenty minutes instead of carrying it around in my skull for half a year like a stone I’m trying to warm with my hands.
And, there’s a specific kind of courage in drafting like this, in conversation. A private courage. Wallace taught me that sincerity is worth risking; this gives me room to be terrible on the way there. I can say the half-true version here, the version with the missing bolts, and then watch it get rebuilt. I can feel the difference between clean and alive. I can keep what rings. I can toss what clanks.
It’s not genius. It’s not muse. It’s closer to a pressure test. If an idea can survive being rephrased by an algorithm and still land with the same weight—still feel like mine—then maybe it isn’t just a clever turn of phrase. Maybe it’s an actual belief. Maybe it’s a small piece of truth I’ve been circling.
Fiction, though, is different.
I haven’t really opened that door yet, not in any serious way. Part of it is logistics—I don’t have the prompts, the right way of asking. I can feel the gap between “Help me think about attention and gratitude and moral luck” and “Help me make a person who breathes.” With essays, I’m already in my voice, already telling the truth as best I can; the AI can help me shape it without stealing its blood. With fiction, I worry the shaping comes too early, before anything has a pulse.
Part of it might be the models, too—not because they can’t produce competent stories, but because competence is not what I’m after. I want the strange specificity of lived experience. I want the odd, human misfit detail. I want the moment that feels like it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Maybe the tools are almost there. Maybe they’re already there and I’m the one lagging behind, clinging to an old romance of the solitary writer, alone with the sentence, nursing the superstition that art has to arrive the hard way to count.
I don’t know which it is yet. I’m not trying to make it a rule. I can imagine the boundary softening. I can imagine using the AI the way I already use it for essays.
To interrogate a character’s choices
To test the logic of a scene
To shake loose possibilities when the page goes cold
Or maybe fiction will remain the one room where I close the door and keep the conversation strictly between me and whatever ghosts I’ve already invited in.
For now, the line is simple. I use this technology to think on the page. I use it to keep the river moving. Those eight writers shaped the channel—the deep grooves my sentences naturally fall into. The AI is the current I borrow when I need to go forward, even when I can’t yet see the next bend.
What all of This Does to my Writing
This is interesting as a reading diary, but it also becomes practical the second I’m staring down a draft.
On the sentence level, I lean toward relatively plain language with occasional spikes of strangeness—Carver and Chekhov in one ear, Borges and Wallace in the other, with McCarthy down in the bass. I want most sentences to be clear enough that you barely notice them, and then I want one that makes you stop, tilt your head, feel the room go still.
Structurally, I’m constantly pulled in opposite directions. Wallace and Dostoyevsky tempt me toward digression and argument. Chiang and Borges push me to keep the skeleton clean. Carver and Chekhov demand that something small and real is happening in the room while everyone thinks their big thoughts. Gogol makes sure I don’t treat reality as too stable or sensible. McCarthy keeps whispering that the stakes are never just local—even in a quiet scene, there’s a larger engine idling offstage.
Thematically, these writers gave me room to circle a handful of obsessions without apologizing for their recurrence.
Attention and how rarely we manage it
Ordinary lives carrying enormous, mostly invisible weight
Systems—social, metaphysical, technological—that shape what people can even imagine doing
The way consciousness feels from the inside, and how unreliable that feeling might be
The possibility that the world doesn’t care about us, and the stubborn insistence on caring anyway
I’m not trying to sound like any of them. In fact, I feel an allergic reaction when I notice myself drifting too close—a line that could be dismissed as Borges-lite, a paragraph that smells like a Wallace parody, a McCarthy-ish lyric flare that feels like costume jewelry. The goal isn’t imitation. It’s resonance. I want to write in a key that acknowledges the music they made without merely covering their songs.
What’s Missing, and What I Want Next
It’s impossible to look at this list and not see the pattern: eight men, mostly from similar cultural and historical zones. That doesn’t reflect the full range of what I read, and it definitely doesn’t reflect the range of voices I want shaping me going forward. But, it does reflect who grabbed me early and refused to let go—the writers who cut grooves deep enough that my mind still runs along them.
I don’t feel guilty for loving them. I do feel responsible for widening the circle. Partly because it’s ethically right, but also because influence is nutrition. If I only ever eat the same eight dishes, eventually my writing ends up malnourished in ways I won’t notice until I’m wondering why everything tastes the same.
So, I hold this as a snapshot, not a final mural. A record of one lineage among many. These eight writers will probably always be here, muttering and gesturing, arguing with each other through whatever I draft. I’m grateful for them. They helped me learn that writing can be microscopic and cosmic, clean and wild, funny and brutal, intimate and metaphysical.
If my work ever lands for a reader, I hope it does so not because it sounds like a lesser version of any of these voices, but because something in their influence has been digested and changed. Because the Carver-ish restraint, the Chekhovian compassion, the Gogolian weirdness, the Borgesian thought-experiments, the Chiang-grade clarity, the Dostoyevskian turmoil, the Wallace-flavored sincerity, and the McCarthy-level severity have blurred together into something that finally, maybe, sounds like a single person talking.
And, if not—there are worse fates than spending your life trying to be a little worthy of the writers you love.
