This is probably a sign of the fact that I am still a rather amateur writer, but I find that whenever I read a different author, their writing style has quite an impression on me. It’s kind of like I absorb aspects of their style and then regurgitate it along with aspects of my own writing. It’s actually to the extent that I can sometimes tell what I was reading at the time of writing certain things.
It’s honestly quite hard for me to imagine not being so impressed by other author’s styles that I absorb aspects of them. I suppose, in a way, I feel like my mind is a little bit of a catalyst and every new book adds something to it and everything that I write will, in some small way, contain something of everything that I’ve read before. Sure, you’d have to extrapolate quite far to make connections between certain things, but I think it could be done. This includes the unpublished work of my friends, because they definitely do sway my work. The difference between me and the famous writers will be that they’ve had the ideal property come out of their catalyst, while I’m still experimenting with mine.
It’s also pretty nice to consider that every other writer is a catalyst. Every book that you read will have been inspired by the books that the author read, which in turn will have been inspired by the books read by the authors of those books. It essentially means that all creativity is part of one growing web of ideas which stretches all the way back to the tall tales told by our cave-dwelling ancestors.