I’ve Never Read Dorothy Dunnett

Claude read my manuscripts and concluded my greatest literary influence was Dorothy Dunnett—the banter-as-intimacy, the intelligence-as-action, the protagonists who mask damage through performance, the period voice maintained without apology. The analysis was sophisticated and technically accurate about what my prose does. It traced these techniques to their most famous literary practitioner and declared the case closed.

Except… I’ve never read Dorothy Dunnett.

I didn’t even know who she was.

The observations were spot on, but the genealogy was completely wrong. And that fascinates me, because it reveals something true about how craft actually develops versus how we assume it develops. We expect writers to emerge from writers, influence flowing downstream through reading—you love Ursula K. Le Guin, so you write like Ursula K. Le Guin, and readers detect the family resemblance. The anxiety of influence model assumes a relatively clean transmission: read, absorb, imitate, eventually find your own voice within the tradition you inherited, right? That’s how this works.

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I spent two years studying British Modernists before dropping out of college. Woolf, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford—writers who understood that the old Victorian architectures couldn’t hold the weight of a fractured century, that form follows trauma, that fragmentation on the page can render what linear narrative cannot, that what’s left unsaid often matters more than what’s spoken. The formal education gave me vocabulary for discussing technique and a framework for understanding why certain choices work and others don’t, even if I never finished the degree and have forgotten most of the academic language. Partly I left because English postgraduates are dirt poor and web developers at the time were rock stars making money hand over fist. Partly I was tired of writing essays exploring J. Alfred Prufrock’s existential crisis about rolling his trousers and eating peaches, or how the blue curtains represent the protagonist’s deep depression and isolation from society.

(I did write a lengthy essay on how Star Wars is literature in the Romanic tradition that earned me an A+ though, so there’s that.)

Anyway, while the professors had me parsing Eliot, I was pursuing my own education on the side.

I fucking love Hemingway. Not because he’s fashionable—he’s not, anymore—but because he’s real. He followed truth. The iceberg theory isn’t a technique you can learn from a craft book and bolt onto your prose; it’s a commitment to honesty about how humans actually experience emotion. We don’t narrate our feelings to ourselves in articulate interior monologue. We turn away. We sigh. We squeeze someone’s hand and hope they understand what we can’t say. Physical action carries emotional weight because that’s how it actually works—the restraint amplifies rather than diminishes, the reader supplies the visceral reaction precisely because you don’t demand it. Melodrama is a kind of lying, and Hemingway refused to lie.

I also refuse to look away from the truth. I just happen to write about bioengineered super-assassins instead of fishermen.

In my work, “he’ll sire no more children” follows a scene of extreme violence, and then “he was resisting” closes the door on it. No horror from the narrator. No dwelling. The understatement does the work that melodrama only pretends to do. “Pretty awful” describes exploded intestines. The protagonist notes with detached annoyance rather than shock that vomit from a torture victim splashed on him. The clinical treatment isn’t coldness—it’s trust. Trust that the reader is smart enough to feel what’s real without being instructed.

The most demanding test of that trust comes in Death or Glory, when one of my protagonists is forced to watch another character’s gang rape over three days. Sexual violence happens in war. For it not to happen in a story about war would be a lie. But what do I actually put on the page? A man walking toward her as he undoes his belt.

Followed by this:

“I have no words for what happened that morning.

When it was over… after St. James and Wright and Bond each… after the eagle warriors all stepped forward… after they had abused her with more than just their bodies… I was drowning in my own vomit.”

Three incomplete clauses. One verb that never arrives. The sentence can’t finish itself, and the reader fills in what the narrator can’t say. That’s the iceberg applied to content Hemingway never dared approach—not omission as authorial control, but omission as character collapse. The narrator breaks, and the prose breaks with him. The camera stays on the witness, not the victim. The gaze is refused. The violence does work—it establishes what he’ll burn the world to avenge, why “we’d shoot her first” becomes a mercy, why he can’t touch his wife afterward—but it exists in white space and aftermath, not spectacle.

Hemingway wrote constrained stories about bullfighters and fishermen with that restraint. I write about genocide and god-emperors and galaxy-spanning stakes with the same commitment. The method transfers because the principle is the same: truth about fishermen, truth about super-assassins, truth about what war does to people who survive it. The gap between clinical prose and apocalyptic content creates tension that isn’t Hemingway, isn’t space opera—it’s whatever I’m building. 

Minimalist execution, maximalist scope.

He taught me how to render difficult things honestly. But he wrote about the contained tragedies of individual men. The permission to apply that restraint to larger questions, to refuse easy resolution at the scale of war and revolution and political violence—that came from somewhere else entirely.

A children’s author, in point of fact. 

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality,” Lloyd Alexander once wrote. “It’s a way of understanding it.”

I’ve been reading Alexander since my early teens, when my aunt introduced me to him through a children’s literature course she was taking. That introduction quickly became obsession. I’ve read everything he ever wrote—not just The Chronicles of Prydain that made him famous, but the adult books from his early career (Janine is French is fantastic), the critically acclaimed yet shamefully forgotten Westmark Trilogy, The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (my personal favorite), The King’s Fountain (breathtakingly profound), his final novel The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio (the gem in his literary crown), and even the obscure and exquisitely beautiful and disturbing story Max Mondrosch (one of his best). I own physical copies of literally everything he published, many as signed first printings I’ve tracked down over years of hunting. A friend of mine curates the Lloyd Alexander collection at the BYU library. I’ve been to the exhibit and was reduced to tears reading his letters to his wife.

It’s my Mecca.

The Chronicles of Prydain are great, but they’re arguably not his best work. What shaped my craft most profoundly is the Westmark Trilogy—his most sophisticated and morally complex achievement (the first book won the 1982 National Book Award), and almost completely overshadowed by Prydain despite being the far better work. Westmark is my literary touchstone. I return to it the way some writers return to Shakespeare or Austen.

What Alexander gave me through all of his work, but Westmark in particular, was permission to refuse false comfort. The trilogy doesn’t flinch from war’s cost or revolution’s moral complexity. It raises questions it never answers—when is political violence justified? can you sacrifice innocents for a greater cause? what happens after you overthrow the tyrant and discover that governance is harder than revolution?—and trusts readers to wrestle with complexity rather than providing easy resolution. In a 1989 interview, Alexander said the content was “very meaningful and very painful” to write about, drawn from his own World War II combat experience. “I did not find answers to questions raised,” he wrote, “and I expect I never will.” Then this, which I’ve returned to again and again: “This wasn’t an attempt to exorcise my demons. No, I keep and cherish those demons. I like to believe they’re my conscience.”

I keep and cherish those demons.

That line unlocked something for me. I don’t write about moral complexity despite finding it disturbing—I write about it because I find it disturbing. The discomfort matters. And the refusal to resolve matters even more. Alexander showed me that you can write adventure fiction that treats serious philosophical questions with uncompromising honesty, that you can trust young readers with genuine tragedy, that the questions matter more than the answers. When my characters wrestle with means-and-ends justifications, when they carry the weight of decisions that saved some lives by taking others, when they discover that the cost of doing what’s necessary doesn’t get refunded just because the cause was just—I’m working in territory Alexander mapped forty years ago.

His influence is so deep I sometimes don’t recognize it until I’m revising and realize I’ve written another scene about the gap between revolutionary idealism and brutal necessity. I wrote all of Born in Battle before I consciously understood that The Kestrel was baked into every page.

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But the rest of my toolkit didn’t come from prose fiction at all.

I grew up in Vancouver during the film industry boom of the 1990s, when the city was doubling for every American location that wanted Canadian tax credits and mild weather. I trained as an actor through my teens—formal classes, theater programs, professional instruction, actual productions. The training taught me that dialogue is action, that every line has an objective, that subtext matters more than text, that characters reveal themselves through what they do and say rather than through authorial explanation of their inner states.

When I write a scene, I don’t construct the character from outside like an architect drafting blueprints. I inhabit them. I become the POV until I’m thinking as they think, reacting as they’d react, feeling the wrongness of a line that doesn’t fit in the mouth even when I can’t articulate why. This is why my morally complex characters don’t read as authorial judgment—you can’t editorialize about someone you’re being. When I write, say, Epasotl, the chaneque witch in the Doomsday Recon trilogy, I’m not thinking “here’s the blue cat-gremlin observing humans with detachment and confusion.” I’m experiencing humans as genuinely confusing, their language as genuinely ugly and stupid, their weird obsessions genuinely baffling. That’s her reality from inside, not a perspective I’m describing from outside.

Concurrent with the acting, I studied dramatic forms for years—screenplays and stage plays both, from my teens into adulthood, reading them, annotating them, reverse-engineering how scenes worked. I often prefer reading plays to prose, if I’m honest. There’s something about the way dramatic writing has to carry everything through dialogue and action, without the novelist’s ability to slip inside a character’s head and explain what they’re feeling, that appeals to my instincts more than traditional fiction does.

Screenwriting teaches you that if it’s not behavior, it doesn’t exist. You can’t write “he’s brilliant” in a screenplay—you have to show him doing something brilliant, in action, in real time, because the page is going to become footage and footage can only capture what characters do and say. Stage plays teach a related but distinct lesson: dialogue has to carry even more weight because you can’t cut away. The camera can show a reaction shot, a meaningful glance, a detail of setting that communicates mood. On stage, the words do almost everything. The discipline of writing for actors who have to make language live in real time, in front of an audience that can’t rewind—that shapes how I craft every line of dialogue I write whether I’m conscious of it or not.

Intelligence-as-action isn’t a stylistic choice I made after careful deliberation; it’s the only way the craft works when you learn it through a dramatic lens. A screenplay page equals roughly a minute of screen time. Every line has to do work. There’s no room for fat, no space for the narrator to step in and explain what behavior already showed.

And then there was the IHOP practice, which sounds ridiculous when I describe it but might be the most valuable training I ever gave myself. Through my early twenties, concurrent with and after college, I spent countless nights at diners at 2am transcribing conversations. Not theater people or academics or the kind of people who show up in literary fiction. Shift workers winding down, drunks processing their evenings, insomniacs staring at coffee, cops between calls. People at the margins, talking the way people actually talk.

Real speech is messy in ways that literary dialogue rarely captures. People talk past each other, interrupt, change subjects without transition, circle back to things they said ten minutes ago, leave sentences unfinished when the other person already understands. Literary dialogue has a tendency toward completeness, toward the well-formed thought articulately expressed. Human conversation doesn’t work that way, and learning the difference taught me how to write characters who sound like themselves rather than like mouthpieces for a writer who’s read a lot of books. That’s why my characters sound different from each other based on class and background—I’m not imitating literary representations of speech. I’m working from primary sources.

The diner transcription was part of something larger: I’ve always been someone who listens to and internalizes other people’s stories and lived experiences. I’ve read memoirs extensively, especially war memoirs, as part of my research into the psychological territory my characters inhabit. Alexander wrote from his own combat experience in WWII. I write from deep study of others’ service—the accounts of veterans I’ve known, the testimonies I’ve read and reread until I carried their scars. You can’t write war honestly if your only sources are other fiction. You have to go to the people who were there.

Same for writing female characters. I’ve been told many, many times I write women exceptionally well. How did I learn this black art? Probably by actually listening to them.

(More male authors should try it, as crazy as it sounds.)

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Anyway, apparently I’ve reverse-engineered techniques that writers usually absorb through reading by assembling them from adjacent disciplines and the results apparently look like Dorothy Dunnett to a pattern-matching AI. Somehow the convergent evolution produced similar features: banter as trust, intelligence as action, performed competence masking interior damage, period voice that never winks at the modern reader. Craft, it turns out, is transferable across forms in ways the standard models don’t capture. An actor’s understanding of objective and subtext, a playwright’s economy, a 2am diner’s ear for authentic speech, a veteran’s memoir internalized until you don’t just feel the weight of what they carried but you carry it too—these are load-bearing skills that don’t require an MFA or a literary pedigree or having read the right canonical authors in the right order.

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Writing programs and craft books assume you learn to write prose by reading prose. There’s truth to that—I’m not dismissing the value of wide reading or the way certain authors become part of your internal furniture. Alexander gave me the load-bearing wall in my aesthetic. Hemingway gave me simplicity and the courage not to look away. Even T.S. Eliot gave me restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and that’s not for nothing.

But it’s not the whole truth, and it may not be the most important truth for writers trying to find their own path.

Influence isn’t always downstream flow from writer to writer where you wrestle with your predecessors until you find your own voice within their tradition. Sometimes it’s lateral, assembled from adjacent disciplines, techniques transferred across forms by ignoramuses like me who didn’t know they were supposed to learn it from books. Maybe the writers who shaped you most aren’t always the ones whose names you’d put on an influence list—maybe they’re the ones whose questions you keep trying to answer, whose demons you’ve inherited and learned to cherish, whose permission made your own work possible.

I’ve never read Dorothy Dunnett. But apparently I write like her anyway.

Might be time to fix that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Where should I start?