Jay Lake, a writer whom I vastly admire, gave me an invaluable snippet of advice recently.
He said:
Read read read. If you don’t have the time to read a lot, at least read the Year’s Best volumes, especially Dozois and Datlow. Read the magazines if you can, and decent selection of new release novels. Without fuel there is no fire.
No fuel, no fire; now that’s a bit of truth. Should seem obvious, but I’m willing to bet it’s a very overlooked piece of wisdom when it comes to mastering the craft of writing.
Writing is about learning, practicing, and perfecting a skillset that takes literally years and thousands of words to get even slightly good at. That’s frustrating, but there’s no way around it.
But writing can’t simply just happen. You don’t exist in a vacuum, drawing ideas out of the cosmos like some sort of alchemist. A writer uses imagination. Collecting ideas from the familiar world, synthesizing, performing intellectual and artistic fusion to create something that is unfamiliar.
Science fiction literature is a genre of ideas, illuminating some truth of humanity that hopefully hasn’t been completely explored before.
As an adult, someone hoping to become a serious, professionally published writer, it’s no longer socially acceptable — well, don’t let me control you — to play in the sandbox any longer. No longer entirely reasonable to draw ideas from cartoon shows and LEGOs, et cetera.
As adults, we have to forge our own private sandboxes — a place in which our muse can relax and cultivate wondrous ideas that will hopefully coalesce into an interesting, logical story and connect with readers of science fiction, fantasy, whatever genre you’re working in.
Mr. Lake put it well: Without fuel there is no fire. You can’t expect to sit down with your eyes against a blank white screen, watching that pixel-wide cursor flash against an idea-less void. You have to feed the imagination.
This requires, I believe, three things: 1) the ability to observe the knowable world, and assimilate the deeper meanings behind various human qualities and relationships, 2) the preexistence of the imagination, which was hopefully nurtured early in life; it is a sad truth that many lack this human luxury, and 3) the ability to feed the imagination.
As you write, you draw on life experiences and the observations you make about the world around you. But in order to create fiction, instead of autobiography, you have to be able to form your own ideas about the universe — or perhaps your own universe — from the imagination.
Reading is the most important way to strengthen the human imagination, hands down. To see, through the eyes of a writer, how a story progresses — and to analyze just how that story might have come about in the mind of the author — is a truly revelatory experience. Of course, it’s a guessing game, and it’s impossible to track the mental process of another human being, but it is possible to gather some important assumptions in the act of trying. More importantly, the thing you will always manage to do is improve at the craft. By seeing the word-by-word construction of a sentence, the varying syntax, the structure of paragraphs, the flow of chapters and their progression toward a climax and resolution, you learn the art of storytelling.
During times of static growth — that infamous “plateau” — solace can be found in the act of reading. And if you’re not reading, damnit, then you ought to be. There are other methods of exercising the imagination, as well.
Television is usually a big no-no in the realm of time-wasters, but films are an artform that can lend itself to improving the craft of writing and storytelling immensely. As a writing exercise, you could perhaps try writing a partial novelization of a film — perhaps just describing the duration of one short scene. This doesn’t exactly make for a submittable story — it’s stealing; plagiarism. But it would make for an excellent exercise. Reading novelizations for years helped me understand the difference between the cinematic artform and writing, and I think it’s benefited me greatly in terms of my growth process over the years.
Imitation is inevitable, it seems. By drawing on the appealing aspects of one writer’s style, one director’s sense of mood, one artist’s vision of the universe, one musician’s soul, a writer or artist can begin to find one’s own voice. It’s a long road, perhaps, but it resides deep within, somewhere buried amid the unconscious, waiting to collect the treasures life has to offer until one day surfacing in the form of a meaningful story.
If you’re going to take a week off from writing, that’s okay. Probably even a good thing; it can take a while to recover from the stress that sometimes — or oftentimes, for some of us — comes with the act of storytelling. Just make sure that if you do, you’re paying attention to the dialogue and scene structure of the films you’re watching. Make sure you’re reading a book constantly, dipping in for at least a couple hours a day. And if you’re going to play video games, you damned sinner, at least watch the cinematics. There’s fuel for the fire everywhere; you just have to have an eye out for it.
Quite a bit about storytelling can be learned from TV shows as well, especially the more modern ones. The plots and characters of many are very complex (You should read “Everything Bad is Good for You” for a better explanation of this and some interesting studies and ideas).
Reading is super important though. I find “fixes” for things I struggle with all the time while reading, as well as hopefully absorbing what it is I like or feel works well in a book so that I can turn around and do it (through lots of writing practice, of course
).
I sometimes joke with my husband that I love him best… after books.
Although I completely agree that reading is vital to a writer, the most insanely fantastic (and controversial) advice for new writers I’ve picked up came out of Dorothea Brande’s 1930s book, “Becoming a Writer.” Brande suggests that a writer, when writing, should cease reading. Not only that: she suggests you should as much as possible avoid words. She says that by doing this, you eliminate all possible sources of narrative or literary release; the only way to attain the satisfaction of experiencing a story is to write one yourself.
Although I’ve gone a few weeks here and there not reading at all, following Brande’s advice–and despite the fact that it truly did work wonders–it’s basically impossible for me not to read; and besides, I learn a lot when I do. But for the sake of developing your own voice, sometimes it’s good to take a break from reading the genre in which you write and read something else: be it non-fiction, poetry, or even scripts. Sometimes, I find that reading another author’s fiction serves not to fill the tank, but rather to burn your own precious reserves of fuel!
-bn
Interesting… because when I’m editing, I can read. When I’m writing first drafts, it’s impossible. Time is in drought-phase for me lately with the kids, so my reading has been reduced to short stories, and it takes me a day or two to get through one. Which actually makes me wonder about some of the issues I’m having on my novel… Perhaps I’m reading too much and killing my need to get the words out?
Very interesting conversation, but it all comes back to everyone works differently doesn’t it?
I find that Joyce Carol Oates’ advice about reading is the best fit for me: Read as much as possible, following your interests, without any plan.
My problem has always been to DECLARE myself a SUCH-AND-SUCH kind of writer. Then, I order all my reading about SUCH-AND-SUCH genre. No good. Didn’t work.
The more freedom I give myself to read, the happier I am — not only as a person, but as a writer.
Writing is an art, and so I view all writers as artist. Like all artists, a musician, painter, sculptor, or film director, some do it as a basis of income, and others because they are just simply driven to do so, and that makes them happy. I couldn’t imagine even the most talented musician giving up his/her vinyl, or digital, albums, or ceasing to listen to other’s music all together. During a long session in the recording studio, perhaps, that would be understandable, but not for any other length of time.
Writers should read other writer’s prose because that is simply how we learn to write, how we learn what works. Aside from plagiarism, no prose from different people are going to sound the same, and a basic theme will mutate so immensely inside different minds that it should still come off as original sounding.
Many writers have written very common stories, and sometimes both make it to print and sometimes one writer just did a much better job of connecting and bringing the story to life. For me, reading is good, but when it comes time to sit down and write I really just try and connect to the story I want to tell. Still, when writer’s block rears its ugly head, I drop the keyboard and pick up a good book or story.
Nice blog Alex, good to see that it has sparked such interesting conversation!
Ryan, I totally agree about different minds producing different works from the same basic ideas. Happens all the time, and keeps things interesting.
Jeff, I think Joyce Carol Oates is a voice to listen to. The woman commands words like an army of demons, and I greatly admire her works–primary her short stories. I have no qualms about reading whatever I ‘feel like’ at any given time. I don’t really “See Myself As” a horror writer, but I’ve grown up drinking the Stephen King Kool-Aid, and my writing often bleeds that sense of the Dark and Terrible, that honesty about the darker nature of humanity. As much as I love SF, and as much as I try to stay true to my Space Opera love, I find myself wandering into dark corridors often when I write without a plan. For example, I recently wrote a story entirely from a dream I had, save for the ending, and it was a dark tale indeed. It’s hard to argue with the subconscious mind; perhaps we shouldn’t try.
Dawn and Ben, that’s a very interesting theory and shocks me somewhat. Perhaps it’s something to try, but I trust the wisdom of Stephen King and Jay Lake immensely. King preaches a healthy doseage of 6-8 hours of reading/writing every day. Some day down the road, when I’m feeling drained, and my imagination is being less than fruitful, maybe I’ll take a break from reading. Now, at this point in my life, reading is the perfect escape from the schoolwork that I so passionately loathe. And I doubt there’s any question that reading makes you a better writer.
Nobu, I totally feel that. I take my book-of-the-moment to my girlfriend’s apartment, and to work, every single day. There’s a lot of downtime at my job, and I use almost all of it for extra reading time. Whenever my girlfriend activates the demon MTV transceiver, I open the book and leave the room. Can’t help it.