Most people do not have parents who are writers, so if they want to write, they don't have anybody they can look at and say, okay, that's how it's done. I had that, so that was nice. Their fiction has influenced me, to a degree, but not nearly as much as the fiction of other writers.
The adventures of Marco Polo are world renowned. His 13th-century trade-diplomatic-possibly-espionage travels to Mongolia and China have become the stuff of legend - in fact, many people think it is just a legend. There's always been doubt that Polo even went to China. Did he go, or did he just pick up other people's stories and sell them as his own? That's just one of the things biographer Laurence Bergreen wanted to know. His book is called "Marco Polo."
Most people do not have parents who are writers, so if they want to write, they don't have anybody they can look at and say, okay, that's how it's done. I had that, so that was nice. Their fiction has influenced me, to a degree, but not nearly as much as the fiction of other writers. 
