Stephen J. Cannell once said that whenever writers get asked about their influences “out comes the list of dead writers.” So Eliot-and-Steinbeck-and-de-Beauvoir- and-Chekhov-and-Foucault-and-Yeats-and-Kierkegaard is probably the right answer—but it’s not true. My major influences aren’t even obscure. There goes my street cred. Thanks, now the only people who will talk to me at conventions will be the Klingons.

Tolkien sucked me into this world when I was young. I found it very irritating that he gave me this huge love for fantasy, and then only wrote four novels. I’d go read other fantasy, and most of it was sooo bad that I’d come back and reread the Lord of the Rings. Then Robert Jordan came along. My first novel, at age thirteen, was perilously close to plagiarizing him, and it took me a long time to escape from his shadow. George R. R. Martin is another giant. He showed me that if you actually kill or maim a major character or two, the next time you put a major character in danger, readers worry. Writing children—especially smart ones—is a huge challenge because it’s so easy to make them precocious and precious, so I love Orson Scott Card’s work. I believe he called his vision “relentlessly plain”: children are young, not stupid; innocent because of lack of exposure, not paragons of virtue.

I was really trying to avoid mentioning this one, but I have to admit a Shakespeare influence. There, I said it. His characters, even his villains, are so conflicted they’re fascinating. I even borrowed a Shakespearean king’s dilemma over what to do with a law-breaking friend.

Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?