The broadest influence a writer can have is when they invent a new way of doing something.
James Joyce’s many innovations in Ulysses have spread out into all kinds of fiction.
The headspace of Leopold Bloom has been plundered for literary techniques.
But it’s by inventing, or crystallising, a new genre or sub-genre that a writer is truly and immediately influential.
Edgar Allan Poe is credited as being the father of detective fiction thanks to his three stories featuring the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin (1841). (However, there’s deductive reasoning relating to a murder in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815).)
H.G.Wells produced a stunning series of genre-making novels from The Time-Machine (1895) to When the Sleeper Wakes (1910).
Some more recent examples, I’d say, and I’m prepared to be challenged, are Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem (1990), Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones (1995), E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Gray (2011) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012).
Each of these books was followed by a deluge of copycats. The cover designs of each of these novels was copied, so as the advertise the kinship of the spin-off.
Asking around, other suggestions of crystallisation were Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020), Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009-2011) and Gabe Cole Novoa’s Most Ardently (2024).
I am not suggesting that all these influences are necessarily good things. Perhaps they simply create a marketable brand. For example, unreliable female narrator crime fiction with ultra-matte black covers. It may be that the really interesting contemporary work is happening with the blending of multiple existing genres.
And it’s also possible that you can find earlier, less well-known writers who made the real innovations, but in a less consistent or just less publicised way. History is written by the bestsellers.
Even so, if you’re really aiming to write something original, surely it has to be sui generis — at least before it’s ripped off.
What other examples of new genres do you know?
I invented Schizo-Noir with In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn