Read to jumpstart your writing.
“If you want to be a writer, you do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Reading can be one way to jumpstart your writing, especially reading examples of the type of writing you’d like to create.
When I first read one of my favorite books, Bright Lights, Big City, I wrote a short story of my own, testing out the unique writing style of the book (the entire novel is written in second person). Not only was this exercise fun and inspiring, I think I learned a lot about my own writing in the process.
I believe most writers develop their own voice gradually through trial and error. By immersing yourself in many influences and trying your hand at the writing style of others, you learn what works for you and what doesn’t. You start to see what you can do differently. You find ways to take what’s been done before and add your own spin to it.
“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 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.”
…You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.
…Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows.
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“I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac.”
You can also read books on the craft of writing itself. There’s a reason I’ve been heavily quoting Stephen King’s book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—It’s a superb book on the writing process. It can be so encouraging to find relatable voices of other writers who have been through the same challenges and struggles and made it to the other side–to see that Stephen King too originally had doubts in works that went on to be key pieces of writing for him. Here’s the origin of Carrie, his first published novel:
“I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away.
The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She’d spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she’d help me with that part. She had her chin tilted down and was smiling in that severely cute way of hers. ‘You’ve got something here,’ she said. ‘I really think you do.’
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I love reading books about writers and the craft of writing. When I wanted to prepare myself for publishing this blog and more openly sharing my writing, I found a relatable voice from Adair Lara in Naked, Drunk, and Writing.
When I wanted to strengthen my plot writing skills, Story Genius by Lisa Cron helped me write the character backstory that plot is built from. The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson helped me learn to create plot within my “Pantser” (a writer who writes “by the seat of their pants”, discovering the story as they write it) tendencies.
When I wanted to learn to be a faster writer, I read 5000 Words Per Hour by Chris Fox and 2000 to 10,000 by Rachel Aaron, both of which opened my mind to how much writing you can get done with focus and practice. When I wanted to learn to write more unique and meaningful emotional scenes for my characters, I found The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass to be immensely helpful.
For me, reading daily has been just as beneficial as writing daily. Every morning, I start my day with reading and a cup of tea to get myself in the right headspace for my writing session.
“I wake up around 5am. I have 2–3 cups of coffee. I read and read and read for two hours. I read high quality literary fiction to be inspired, high quality non-fiction about a topic I am fascinated by in order to learn, I read inspirational or spiritual writing to feel that special something inside, and often I will spend some time studying a game. Then I might read the literary fiction some more. At some point, I get the urge or the itch to put the books away. I go to my computer and start to write.”
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