I know that when I made my first forays into fiction writing in the latter years of elementary school, whatever I wrote was seriously influenced by whatever author I happened to be currently reading and enjoying. I had a Tolkien phase, and a McCaffrey phase, and a Hawthorne phase, and a T.H. White phase, and lord only knows how many others. By the time I reached my latter years of high school, I started to become aware of this, so that when I started work on the more ambitious works I wanted to submit for professional publication, I had to consciously guard against inadvertent imitation. Meant a lot of editing and rewriting. I'm sure my original fiction has traces of all the authors who have most profoundly influenced me, but I haven't been accused of sounding like anyone but myself for decades -- unless I did it deliberately. Perhaps it's a kind of mellowing that comes with age.
