Gleanings: You Become What You Read, Techniques of the Selling Writer

“Read all sorts of things, especially in your preferred genre…Read everything that’s good. Start with Pulitzer Prize winners and National Book Award winners, the Booker Prize and Whitbread winners…” ~ Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Pen on Fire.

The above advice is good, with exceptions. I once read a Pulitzer Prize winning novel in which men had sex with cows. I stopped with that scene and started to laugh. Did the author even know cows up close? Did those Pulitzer people know cows?

I have heard and...