This is part of a series on how to study fiction, mainly directed at writers who have read all the beginning writing books and are like, “What now?!?” The rest of the series is here.
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What to read, how to read, and how to start studying it. Every professional writer seems to have the same kind of advice: Read more.
But you could read the back of the cereal box all day and not get better as a writer.
So…what?
Reading issues at this level:
- Being unsure of what one’s reading goals should be versus what you’re trying to achieve as a writer overall.
- Being unsure of how to understand why you felt about a book the way you did (either to love it or hate it).
- Feeling like reading someone else’s book choices is a waste of time.
- Feeling like you’re missing something and you don’t know what.
When you’re reading as a reader, you basically only have one goal: to please yourself. One’s pleasure as a reader isn’t something you should ditch as a writer, either. Sometimes I wonder if learning what you love and don’t love about a book isn’t 80% of the work of improving as a writer anyway.
However, when you’re a writer, you have some additional tasks as a reader that need to be met:
- Understanding the genre(s) you’re writing in.
- Understanding how stories work on a primal level.
- Identifying what elements of storytelling you enjoy in a practical (“So that’s what is missing from my stories!”) kind of way.
- Getting at the roots of what makes stories valuable for readers.
Being a professional reader (which is kind of an aspect of being a professional writer!) means both understanding what best fits your own tastes and why other readers read what they do.
When you hit that point, you no longer roll your eyes at bestsellers you don’t like. Instead, you start going, “So people like book X because it gives them Y. I like Y, just not how it’s done here…why not write Y in my own way?”
Getting better as a reader is about half the raw data that you need in order to decrypt what makes a book good or not.
Where does the other half come from? More on that in a bit.
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