Just what it says on the tin

[capri0mni]

[Poll #1316945]

Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

If you're going to write a novel, reading more novels is definitely a good idea, though you need to read them with the intent of finding what makes them tick, rather than just for fun, because then the books will be your teachers, rather than just a diversion. For that reason, I haven't answered your poll, because there's no correct answer provided for your first question (or, actually, any of your questions--the others just aren't relevant, IMO). You don't choose the books according to things like favorite authors or whether or not they make you uncomfortable. You choose them because they've tackled genres, topics, characters, or narrative issues similar to those you [expect to] deal with. You choose a wide variety of authors, rather than reading one author's entire catalog. You ask others for recommendations on those grounds. The idea is not to crib so much from other authors as to get your brain churning along those lines and see what sorts of inspiration strikes (though cribbing from other authors is fine as long as you're not outright stealing).

You also don't worry about whether or not your book will appeal to X sort of people, or what genres attract most people. You write the story you have to write, as well as you possibly can, and then hope that it will find its audience--which may or may not be the audience you had in mind or expected. Other people will sort that out. It's not your concern.

That, right there, in two tiny paragraphs, is the core of my graduate program. Everything else is details.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't ask the questions only to help me to write. That's what the first question was for. The others were just to learn more about the people on my friends list.

And some of my reading will be for the purpose of self-education. But we're entering the Bleak Midwinter, and I need some hugs, too, if I'm going to survive until spring, frankly.

My thought behind the first question was: should I focus on my favorite writers so that I can dissect them and figure out why their my favorites? That's basically what my instinct tells me.

And there are some genres and types of novels (romance, horror, and the like) that I generally make me squirm, and want to throw the book across the room. But part of me thinks I need to read genres I don't particularly like in order to learn different ways of telling stories.

I've got an Anne Rice vampire novel that Audrey loaned me still on my kitchen table. I got part way through the first chapter before I decided I didn't like it at all, and put it down and never picked it up again. But a lot of people think she's a fantastic writer, and it might be a worthwhile exercise for me to try and figure out why.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

Your poll was couched in terms of writing a novel next year, so that's how I took it. I'm not reading romance and mystery and horror novels as part of my MFA, because they're not relevant to the thesis I'm writing. If you just want to take a break from time to time, you have that luxury and should read what you want. I still don't really think the rest of the questions are relevant, except as a curiosity.

The proviso against reading more than one book by the same author is intended to prevent you from unconsciously absorbing too much of that author's voice/methodology/diction/etc at the expense of your own. I don't think figuring out why your favorite authors' books are your favorites is relevant to writing your own novel, either, honestly. And even if you strongly feel that it is, I can't see where you'd need to read more than your favorite book by your favorite author in order to do it. If you can figure out what makes one book tick, you've done your job. But figuring out what makes a book tick and figuring out why it's a favorite are still not the same thing.

You could try to figure out why other people like Anne Rice, but I think it's be a better use of your time to dig into something that you actually like, rather than torturing yourself with something you can't stand. There are some universals in terms of craft and technique, after all, and you can find them in books you like just as much as books you don't--and your odds of finding them in books you like are considerably better, because you're not fighting the material. Same goes for genres. You can find myriad ways of telling stories by sticking to things that you do like--there are millions of books out there, after all. (You might want to see if your local library has Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer available, for instance.) Even the most strict of my advisors wasn't interested in forcing me to read (or in this case, re-read) a book that I hated when I could get the same lesson somewhere else.