Every publishing house has a personality, whether they admit it or not. You can feel it in the books they choose, the covers they design, the way their prose moves on the page. Some houses feel cool and minimal. Others feel warm and slightly chaotic. Ours, I hope, feels like a conversation between smart people who aren’t trying to impress each other. And the books that shaped that sensibility are worth talking about, because house style doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s built, book by book, influence by influence.

When I started ScrollWorks Media, I didn’t sit down and write a style guide. I probably should have, but what happened instead was more organic. I kept a shelf of books that I’d pull down when I needed to remember what good writing felt like. Books I’d re-read when I was editing a manuscript and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. Books that reminded me of the effect I wanted our work to produce in a reader. Over time, that shelf became our unofficial style guide, and the books on it influenced everything from our sentence-level editing to our approach to narrative structure.

The first book I’d put on the list is “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. If our house has a guiding principle, it’s the one Ishiguro demonstrates here: restraint is a form of power. Stevens, the butler, never says what he means. The reader has to infer everything, the regret, the love, the wasted life, from the gap between what he says and what he feels. This technique of withholding, of trusting the reader to understand what’s happening beneath the surface, is something I push for in almost every book we work on. I don’t want our authors to tell readers how to feel. I want them to create conditions where the feeling is inescapable.

Ishiguro’s prose is also worth studying for its deceptive simplicity. He doesn’t use flashy vocabulary or complicated syntax. His sentences are clear and measured. But the cumulative effect is devastating. By the end of the book, you’re emotionally wrecked by sentences that, individually, read like polite small talk. That’s a level of craft that I find inspiring, and it’s the benchmark I hold up when an author tells me their manuscript needs more “lyrical” language. Usually, what it needs is more precision.

The second book is “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. I know it’s controversial to admire Capote at this point, given the questions about his accuracy and his exploitation of the people involved. I’m not holding him up as a moral example. But as a piece of writing, “In Cold Blood” taught me more about narrative structure than any craft book ever has. Capote took a newspaper story, a family murdered in rural Kansas, and built it into something that reads like a novel while remaining (mostly) factual. The pacing is extraordinary. The way he intercuts between the victims’ lives and the killers’ journey across America creates a sense of dread that’s almost unbearable. If you want to understand how to structure a nonfiction narrative, this is the template.

What I specifically take from Capote is the willingness to slow down. Modern publishing is obsessed with pace. Every chapter has to end on a cliffhanger. Every scene has to advance the plot. Capote ignores all of that. He spends pages describing the Clutter family’s daily routines, their meals, their relationships with neighbors. None of this “advances the plot.” All of it is necessary. By the time the violence arrives, you feel it in your bones because Capote made you live in that house first. I encourage our authors to do the same thing: earn the big moments by investing in the small ones.

Third on my list is “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. I know, I know. It’s a cliche. Every editor cites this book. But there’s a reason it’s endured for almost a century while flashier writing guides have come and gone. The core principle, “omit needless words,” is the single most useful piece of writing advice ever formulated. I think about it constantly. I apply it to every manuscript that crosses my desk. Most first drafts use twice as many words as they need. Cutting them isn’t about making the book shorter; it’s about making every remaining word count for more.

Strunk and White have been criticized in recent years, some of it deservedly. Their prescriptive rules can feel dated, and their attitude toward non-standard English is narrow. I don’t treat the book as gospel. But its underlying philosophy, that good writing is clear writing, that clarity requires effort, that every sentence should be necessary, is as relevant now as it was in 1920. When I edit, I’m always asking: does this sentence earn its place? Would the paragraph work without it? If the answer is yes, the sentence goes. Strunk would approve.

The fourth book is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion. Didion’s essay collection taught me that voice can carry anything. Her sentences are strange and declarative and weirdly rhythmic. She starts “The White Album” with the line “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is one of those sentences that sounds obvious until you realize it contains an entire worldview. Didion writes like she’s solving a puzzle on the page, fitting pieces together and stepping back to see if the picture makes sense. Her influence on our house style is mostly about voice, about letting the writer’s personality come through without becoming the point.

What Didion does better than almost anyone is write from a position of uncertainty. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. She’s working things out in real time, and the reader gets to watch the process. This is something I actively seek in the manuscripts we publish. I don’t want authors who have everything figured out before they start writing. I want authors who are thinking on the page, who are willing to follow an idea somewhere unexpected, who trust the reader enough to share the mess of discovery. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and valuable, and Didion modeled it better than anyone.

Fifth is “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders. This might seem like an odd choice for a book that influenced house style, since it’s so formally experimental. But what Saunders demonstrates here is that risk-taking and accessibility aren’t opposites. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is one of the strangest novels published in the last decade. It’s a chorus of ghostly voices, a collage of historical documents (some real, some invented), and a meditation on grief and parenthood. It sounds like it should be unreadable. Instead, it’s one of the most emotionally devastating books I’ve ever encountered.

The lesson I take from Saunders is: don’t be afraid to try something new, but make sure the reader can follow you. His innovations serve the story. They’re not showing off. Every formal choice he makes (the chorus structure, the mix of fact and fiction, the fractured timeline) exists because the conventional approach wouldn’t have achieved the same emotional effect. When our authors want to experiment with form, I point them to Saunders as proof that experimentation works when it’s in service of something larger than itself.

Sixth is “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I re-read it every couple of years, and every time I’m astonished by how perfectly constructed it is. At barely 50,000 words, it’s one of the most efficient novels ever written. There isn’t a wasted paragraph. The symbolism is layered but never heavy-handed. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is one of literature’s great inventions: a seemingly neutral observer who turns out to be deeply unreliable. As a model for first-person narration, I don’t think it’s ever been surpassed.

What Fitzgerald taught me about editing, specifically, is the power of the final line. The last page of “Gatsby” is so perfectly written that it elevates everything that came before it. A good ending doesn’t just conclude the story; it reframes it. It makes you want to go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again with new eyes. When I’m editing a manuscript, I spend disproportionate time on the ending, because a strong ending can save a flawed book and a weak ending can ruin a good one. Fitzgerald knew this instinctively.

Seventh is “Educated” by Tara Westover. This memoir influenced our approach to nonfiction specifically. Westover writes about her childhood in a survivalist family in Idaho, her lack of formal education, and her eventual path to a PhD from Cambridge. The story itself is extraordinary, but what I admire most is her refusal to simplify it. She doesn’t make herself a hero. She doesn’t make her family purely villains. She holds complexity without resolving it, and the book is more honest for that refusal.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve worked on memoirs and personal narratives, and the temptation to flatten real life into a neat arc is always there. The hero overcomes adversity. The villain gets their comeuppance. The lesson is learned. Westover resists all of that. She still loves her family. She’s still angry at them. Both things are true at once. When I edit memoir, I push authors toward that kind of complexity. Real life doesn’t have clean resolutions, and pretending it does is a form of dishonesty.

The eighth book is “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel. A post-apocalyptic novel about a traveling Shakespeare company might sound niche, but Mandel’s genius is making it feel universal. What I take from this book is the importance of structural ambition. “Station Eleven” jumps between timelines, characters, and settings with a confidence that’s breathtaking. Every fragment connects to every other fragment, and the connections aren’t always obvious at first. The reader has to trust the author and keep reading, and Mandel rewards that trust completely.

This is something I encourage in our authors: trust the reader. Don’t explain every connection. Don’t spell out every theme. If the structure is sound, the reader will figure it out, and the pleasure of figuring it out is part of the experience. Books that over-explain their own significance insult the reader’s intelligence. Books that trust the reader to assemble meaning on their own create a kind of collaborative magic. Mandel does this as well as any living novelist.

I could list more books, many more, but these eight represent the core of what I think of as our aesthetic at ScrollWorks. Restraint from Ishiguro. Structure from Capote. Economy from Strunk and White. Voice from Didion. Risk from Saunders. Craft from Fitzgerald. Complexity from Westover. Trust from Mandel. These aren’t rules. They’re tendencies, leanings, biases that shape how we read manuscripts and how we edit them. Every publishing house has them, whether they’ve articulated them or not.

What I’ve found is that having a clear set of influences makes editing easier. When I’m stuck on a manuscript, wondering what’s wrong or what it needs, I can often diagnose the problem by asking which of these principles it’s violating. Is the prose trying too hard? (It needs more Ishiguro.) Is the structure confusing without payoff? (It needs more Mandel.) Is the voice generic? (It needs more Didion.) These aren’t formulas. They’re compass points. They help me orient the work without constraining it.

I’d encourage any reader, and any writer, to build their own shelf of influences. Not the books you think you should admire, but the books that actually changed how you read and write. The books you go back to when you need to remember what the art form is capable of. Those books will tell you something about your own aesthetic that no writing manual can articulate. They’ll also give you a vocabulary for discussing what makes writing work, which is more useful than any set of rules. Rules are rigid. Influences are alive. They keep teaching you new things every time you return to them, which is, I think, one of the defining characteristics of great writing: it grows with you.