E.B. White

Did you know that the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little also wrote Elements of Style, the definitive English style writing guide? Yup, it's the same E.B. White in both cases. He was also a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine for six decades.

I love that. I love that one guy can write some of the most powerful, important children's literature in the world, and also write a popular/academic style guide / textbook (a popular-academic-style-textbook? Wow). Probably because my own writings don't exactly fit into a pigeonhole - am I a children's author? A self-help writer? A technical guy? My writing genres are all over the map. I've done adventure/mystery books for kids, a collection of short spiritual fiction, a self-help guide to "doing stuff that matters," and a design book about complexity & simplicity... what kind of writer does that make me?

From one perspective, one might look at my books (questions of quality aside) and conclude I haven't figured out what kind of writer I want to be. But the opposite is true. I know exactly what kind of writer I want to be - an eclectic, varied writer, like E.B. White.