What Writers Read

A reader recently wrote to ask:
I have always wondered if reading makes you a better writer. I find that reading books can sometimes influence my writing and diminish my creativity regarding my own work. However, I am curious whether reading more could actually enhance my writing in any way.

You bring back memories of my teenage years, when I'd just read an old translation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea...and I started thinking in an old-fashioned English style. No sooner had I recovered than I began reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and began writing in a clipped, unemotional style...until I got into Catcher in the Rye, and started sounding like a mid-1940s whiney teenage jerk, for Chrissake!

Well, that's just an occupational hazard. Sometimes a writer comes along with a style that's literally infectious (I hate to think of the thousands of young Salinger imitators in the 1950s and 60s). Hemingway swiped the deadpan style of the medieval Icelandic sagas. Some of his readers used it to create the hardboiled detective novel.

Every writer should be a voracious reader, and not only in one's own preferred genre. As a writer of SF and fantasy, I'm in a long line going back to Menippus, Lucian, St. Thomas More, and Jonathan Swift. They started a kind of conversation that's been going on for two thousand years, and I added my humble bit to it. Writers of gothic romance are answering the Bronte sisters, and crime writers are responding to Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard.

But if all you read is your own genre, you're going to be in trouble very soon. Writers choose a particular genre because it can express something the writers want to say. H. G. Wells wrote SF, but he also wrote social satire, romance, and a host of other genres. To do so required a huge range of reading.

Even if you want to stick to a single genre (Celtic heroic fantasy, say), you can't recycle Irish myths forever. Your addition to the conversation should give us something new, something we hadn't thought about in this connection.

Just off the top of my head, imagine an Irish fantasy story drawing on a historic fact: the Phoenicians and others sailed out of the Mediterranean to trade for tin and other valuables. So imagine a story in which Celtic gods and heroes must confront the child-devouring gods of the Phoenicians.

Simply to get this idea, you need to read some Irish history and archaeology, and then get into what we know about the Bronze Age Mediterranean of three or four thousand years ago. That in turn could get you reading fiction set in that era, generating still more ideas.

This is really just "applied" reading, feeding yourself with material you can use directly in your present story. But if you also read widely in genres and on topics you know nothing about, you're likely to stumble across still more ideas. Those can inspire new and unusual stories.

Far from diminishing your creativity, such reading will increase it. Sometimes you'll find a writer so good that you'll feel crushed. But don't be! Ask yourself: "How is this damn genius getting away with it? Why is he making me laugh or cry while I turn the pages?"

The answers to questions like that will give you new confidence for your own work, and that in turn will make your work more fun to write and to read.

And if you've really learned from your reading, some future reader will ask: "Damn! How is she doing that? How can I top what she's doing?"

Comments

[susan]

Ah yes, I agree wholeheartedly. Poe showed up in my writing for years with the formal language. Just read Steinbeck's The Pearl and started writing fable-like. It's okay, as long as it's recognized and used as an exercise that will be tempered by even more reading; especially, as you say, in other genres.

[robin]

I once saw Margaret Atwood speak and what really stuck with me is that she said that she reads "everything"... not just high brow lit. Comic books, different genres, teen books, poetry, bestsellers, nonfiction... everything. This really inspired me to abandon my inner literary snob. How liberating!

[Cicily Janus]

I could never believe that anyone who wants to write "the great novel" would ask such a question. The only way that anyone, in this one persons opinion, can write well, is to read what good writers put down on their pieces of paper.

Most writers that I know read as if it is their last moment on Earth and reading every book that has been written is the only requirement to get into Heaven.

Keep reading, trust me, it will not stifle your "creative process". Pick up a copy of Stephen King's On Writing. It is a marvelous book. I also suggest that you take a look at Crawfords Web post on how to write the novel.

Discipline and creativity combined, as well as reading, reading, reading.....