It does not take any extraordinary amounts of digging into my influences to uncover that Harlan Ellison is my go-to writer. This, of course, was a change from my previous icons of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Coupland and Ursula K. Le Guin; all of whom still have a place in my heart and imprint in my words.

However, the usual tactics of reading, and re-reading, a writer, copying their prose and imitating it with your own spin, wasn’t enough to reach the flow that Ellison wrote. It finally dawned on me why many writers, myself included, will never write like him.

Yes, he is his own person and quite the character, but that’s the lead-in.

Writers are incredibly self-conscious about their work, often stopping themselves from their own potential as artists thanks to the critical voice that gnaws at their brain. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and her husband Dean speak about this extensively.

We are critical of our own work.

We are critical of ourselves.

We fear the criticism of others.

Ellison, on the other hand, had no filter. He had no critical voice because his voice was to be critical of others. Take any of his short stories and you will see a writer attempting to hold a mirror against humanity, filtered through the outrage of a writer who went to war with the world about everything.

You don’t sit in bookstore windows with your typewriter, writing stories on the spot, one draft, and then submit them for publication (many won awards) if there is any critical voice in your head.

To write like him is not so much to imitate his style, but to approach the craft uninhibited.

It’s something I now work towards every day.