Good writers read

Article

23 Feb

Once you have pulled the dusty, cobweb-draped, musty words of your first novel from your creative vault and plastered them onto page or screen, you have all you need. Just like that. Have any new, less dusty, certainly without arachnid house-weaving material and better smelling ideas forced themselves on you while you did this? Write them in before they escape. You can always delete or modify them later, even use them in other parts of a series, if that's the way the story pans out. As a writer you can delete or add an entire city as you please.

Resist all attempts by stray characters, no matter how much they plead, to stall you by suggesting you tell us how nice their hair is, where they went to school or their life as a spy. If they point out important plot links and tempt you to sit for a moment or two while they deliver details they assure you will be of interest to all your readers, make a cursory note only. Quiet their din, show them who is in charge here.

Write until you have reached the end of what you know as 'the story'. By now, you may have a fully-fledged draft lying on the table — an outpouring of all those thoughts that have been pressing to be aired, placed alongside other valuable possibilities that popped into your mind along the way. It may appear as disjointed chunks lying all over the pages with nothing to thread them together. No need to fret about that. A strong thread running throughout, binding it tightly, is that you pulled them from files in your head all labelled something like: The novel I have been longing to write.

Now is probably the time to decide which genre you are writing in. Do not worry too much about forcing yourself down the narrow and restrictive passageways of a particular sub-genre of a sub-genre. Way too fancy. A close fix is good enough. This exercise will determine a lot of how you go about finessing your work. Significantly, there are approximate word count expectations of each genre. Find your target — it will help with your vision of the size a complete work compared with your current stage.

You cannot serve a juicy medium steak to a vegan diner, no matter how well it is cooked. Each genre's readers have their own sets of demands regarding the characters, settings, language, emotions, and so on, you present for consumption. Your job is to push and pull and tweak all the elements that are the ingredients of every novel and create scenarios that draw your target readers in — genre targeted. Your audience expects specific treatment of those elements, and you must, mostly, deliver them. If you don't, you need to be clever with what you offer up as a substitute. You cannot tell readers what they should read. They will choose and they will share that choice with friends.

Can you now see the importance of keeping up both a reading and a writing habit? Reading will give you clear examples of what it is your future readers will expect when they have been convinced to take your book home. Doesn't that sound good? "Take your book home"? Oh yes, give me more of that. We will be exploring reading in the next article, too.

What benefit can you get, as a writer, out of reading? Firstly, for books in the genre you are writing, you will meet the sort of people who inhabit the world of [insert genre], how they are introduced, how they live, how they grow. In every world that is created by writers, the people and other inhabitants have to move place to place. How do they do this? What do they live in? Are there incidents that are frowned upon? You get the picture of this don't you? Any more, and you would bang your head on that piece of furniture in front of you and yell, "Stop with the obvious." Or is that just me?

On the other hand, we often read across several genres. There is no literary agency to set a limiting rule for what we can and do find an interesting read. We are free to pick and choose. Does reading outside the genre you want to write a best-seller in help with the generation of ideas? Very much so. One is the change of style in the writer's presentation of the story. This will give you ways of thinking that stop you being pressed into a narrow channel of thought and creativity. It is important that we learn to enjoy alternatives. Are there words that tweak your interest? Nice words to use on future pages. Are there different mechanisms you could use to change scenes?

Explore the opening and closing pages to each story. Are they satisfying to you? If a hero is knocked to the ground, either figuratively or literally, how do they pick themselves up and carry on doing hero things? You do not copy word for word but knead the ideas until they meet your needs. Chop them up or stretch them out. You decide.

How many times have you read a book that has received accolades from all manner of critics and think that it was a load of rubbish? More than once, I bet. So, you should read copiously, extract what you need and write intriguing tales for us all to consume. Some of us will react in negative ways, some of us will tell the world how good it all was. That's just the way it is.

Don’t be discouraged. Remember that when you finish your novel, you will have achieved a task that few others in the world have. Even that is reward.

Next time we will explore a few more ways reading can help us with creating better stories. Keep on writing. The world is queued up for more to read.

Damon