Is Your Reading Beating Up Your Writing?

To Tara Sperling, great books can be book heroin to distract you. To me, great books are always a learning experience. Every book is a book to study and use to improve my writing style. Is a book a piece of crap? (That’s right, there are far too many out there.) What are they doing that I need to avoid. Why does this passage drag so badly? How could I make it zip? Does the dialogue make me want to close the book and walk away? Why and how could I fix it.

Books like Love in the Ruins, The Golden Notebook, and Gravity’s Rainbow? I don’t cringe and wish I could write as well. I ask myself, what is it about their technique that appeals to me and can I adapt it to my own writing? Even books like Conne Willis’ Bellwether or indie books like Ian Probert’s Johnny Nothing I see as learning opportunities.

It’s okay to feel intimidated by better writing. It’s a mistake to think you’ll never write like that. Unless you fail to understand that all writers are our teachers.

Like Tara says, don’t do book drugs. Turn them into your prescription medicine.

Tara Sparling writes

The books you’re reading can and do inform and influence your writing. We like to believe that this is a good thing. That just like kicking an annoying teenager out of your house, the tough love of getting away from your creation can make for a more well-rounded individual in the end.

However, the books you’re reading – especially if they’re very good – can also play havoc with your writing. For instance, they might make you feel inadequate or inferior. And by far the most nefarious thing a good book written by someone else can do, is stop you writing altogether, through sheer distraction.

The last time I was reading book heroin – well, let’s call it baby book heroin. It wasn’t the full high, but it did in a pinch, so it was kind of more like book methadone really – it told me a lot of things about what I was writing. Things I didn’t want to hear, mainly. Granted, I was…

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