The one who influenced me most in my writing journey was my late mother. She was a teacher and I remember she instilled the reading habit in us from very young. She made sure my siblings and I borrowed story books from the public library every weekend and read them. Then we had to write a summary of the stories we read, the new vocabulary we learned and to copy down the interesting sentences that we liked.
She said that was one way of learning the writer’s style. We would eventually find our own style of writing but we had to familiarize ourselves with the way authors wrote, how they used words to describe scenes, feelings, etc.
This was when we were in early elementary school and I believe this was when I developed a love for reading, garnering new vocabulary and above all, I learned to like perusing the dictionary whenever I came across a new word that I didn’t know the meaning of.
Whenever we went out on trips to the countryside or to a new place, be it a small town or village, we had to write down what we saw and what we liked. She encouraged us to use the vocabulary we had learned. This was how I developed a flair for writing, letting my imagination run wild.