To read and what to read

that is the question...

Writing, like any art form, really, is influenced by what kind of art, or genre, we read/listen/spend time with. If you write music and you listen to Death Metal, chances are your final product will be one of hammering rhythms. If you spend hours without end poring over Picasso's work, chances are your own paintings will look like Picasso knock offs. If you read run of the mill fantasy, chances are you will write your tales in a similar style. And don't call reading DragonLance or Forgotten Realms research either. Research is reading texts on specific matters like sword fighting, how people lived in which social class in a given era and whatnot, it has nothing to do with women sporting chain bikinis flinging themselves at dragons.

I've read my share of DragonLance and Forgotten Realms novels, and roleplaying supplements... and when the first version of what is now Shattered Dreams was finished it pretty much read like one of those novels as well. Lots of heroic battles, magic spells being hurled by wise mages and that sort of stuff.

I was drawing Picasso because that's all I surrounded myself with.

An acquaintance then suggested that I should not read the genre I was writing in, and while I was too cocky to pay heed, in the end it was what made things better, for the book and my style as well.

I've heard people say, okay, I've read people say that they read fantasy to know what their audience wants/expects. Pretty highbrow speech for "I wanna produce the next Harry Potter" and were Harry P readers in a constant state of being young teenagers, it might work, but even the dumbest kid will eventually realize you're fucking with them, cashing in on the wish-fulfillment fantasies and not really offering them anything new.

Sure you can be successful by copying the greats, but the eternal question bugging the fuck out of me has been and will always be this: what makes me happy? Sure, I write to be read, but my primary audience is me.

No, this is not narcissism, I'm only the center of my universe, not yours, but in the end, what makes one happy is the knowledge that one has produced something that makes them happy. Be it the crayon drawings we made in kindergarten or a poem we had to write in 3rd grade. Are they masterpieces? Probably not, but at the time they were, for us, and that's all that counted.

Now, decades after kindergarten and elementary school, our interests and tastes have, hopefully, changed. At times even what we enjoyed a few years ago, no annoys the fuck out of us. For instance, take the abomination that, for our adult eyes, was Episode I The Phantom Menace. Yes, yes, I know, the film sucked balls, but ask kids for whom this film was the first encounter with Star Wars. They'll tell you they love it, and that feeling will persist until a few years later they might have read or seen a story with a decent beginning, middle and end, believable characters and motivations. That moment comes to us all, and when that moment is there what we loved and would have killed for in the past is just as much part of our past as the crayon drawings which have been taken off the refrigerator door a few years ago, or the poem that lost its appeal around the time you discovered novels... who knows, fact is we all grow into other tastes.

If you're stuck with one thing too long, your works will look/feel like it too, and instead of writing your own thing, your stories are slightly elevated fan fiction. If you do not step out of your comfort zone, you will not grow as a writer.

I used to read only heroic fantasy and Star Wars... then I began reading everything else. And I discovered a whole world of suspense and disturbing humans that make Sauron or Takhisis look like altar kids. It also gave me an appreciation of pace, and while "relentless" now seems to be my MO, I know there are other paces... all that you miss out on, if you just stick withing the boundaries of your comfort zone.