This bit really resonated with me, I feel this is exactly my experience:
You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury–everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hardboiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine. I wrote stories in my teenage years where all these styles merged, creating a kind of hilarious stew. This sort of stylistic blending is a necessary part of developing one’s own style, but it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/ she wanted to become a writer but ‘didn’t have time to read,’ I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
There’s something I take away from every book I read. I think Michael Crichton’s The Lost World taught me the most this year. It was slow moving until they reached the island, stuff happened so it was interesting but once things started to go wrong on the island, man they didn’t just go wrong, they get worse and worse and worse. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. I had to stop reading at times because things looked so bad. So the lesson from it is just when you think you’ve written enough bad things, write more of them!
how about you? What book taught you what lesson?
You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury–everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hardboiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine. I wrote stories in my teenage years where all these styles merged, creating a kind of hilarious stew. This sort of stylistic blending is a necessary part of developing one’s own style, but it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/ she wanted to become a writer but ‘didn’t have time to read,’ I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
There’s something I take away from every book I read. I think Michael Crichton’s The Lost World taught me the most this year. It was slow moving until they reached the island, stuff happened so it was interesting but once things started to go wrong on the island, man they didn’t just go wrong, they get worse and worse and worse. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. I had to stop reading at times because things looked so bad. So the lesson from it is just when you think you’ve written enough bad things, write more of them!
how about you? What book taught you what lesson?
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