Some people, writers in particular, sometimes have a "special" book. A book they're particularly fond of, a book that helped make them what they are. I'm sure I do. Do you? What is it?
There really aren't, to be honest. There are lots of individual writers who've inspired me over the years, and books that represent things I love and take inspiration from (the classic being Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable), but no individual books I can namecheck.
Probably the main individual thing was a talk I heard at school from someone who worked for one of the London newspapers discussing how they'd wanted to be a writer but hadn't thought they could ever do it for a living - that you needed to Know The Right People, or be trained from birth to it or similar. It wasn't exactly an epiphany, I'd always loved writing, but it was the moment I started seriously thinking "Why the hell not me?" A few years - and some spectacularly shitty copy that seemed good at the time but really, really wasn't - later, it was.
(And to clarify, the way you become a writer is to write and submit and fail and get better and keep on pushing. It doesn't magically happen, and the handful of people who magically get plucked fully-formed and competent out of the ether are notable because they're so rare. If your idea of being a writer is thinking "I really wish I was a writer", you're never going to get anywhere. Writers write and writers submit.)
