As a writer, I’m very much a, “Always go to the source. No, not the how-to-write book. Actually go open up a novel you love/hate/whatever and LOOK in it” person.
Mostly because it’s the only place you can find actually-published-in-the-wild examples of techniques that are still connected to the FULL context of the rest of the work.
Actual published works in your genre are really rich sources of data. If you realize you’re allowed to go back to them, refer back to them, just as you might a textbook.
They show you HOW an author did something. They ALSO show you–if you think an author didn’t do something right–how much you are allowed to be “bad” while still being considered publishable.
Which I find kinda fascinating.
So, my question for you other writers is this…what is ONE thing, one example, of something writing-related that you learned from a very specific book?
It doesn’t have to be unique to that book. And it doesn’t have to be a mind-blowing relevation.
It can be something simple like grammar or spelling, it can be something related to characters, or how to write dialogue, or how to build world or describe a scene.
I just want to build up a store of examples here for writers new and old of how one might go to a “primary source” to learn something new about our shared Craft.
On a lot of other writing subs I see people asking questions that would often be easier to answer if they pulled a book in the genre they’re writing off the shelf and looked inside it.
I will put my example below, in a comment.
I write sci-fi and fantasy. So my example is from Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind.
It was the 90s, and I was 12 or 13, and at the time he was being marketed like that era’s Patrick Rothfuss. Some of the later books that would start to get kinda silly plot-wise hadn’t been released yet–he was riding high on the fame of his first one or two books. (What I’m saying is…we very much don’t share politics. But from a Craft standpoint, he did certain things well enough to make middle-school-me a fan. And I think paying attention to bits of Craft that are done well is important, no matter who created the example you are trying to learn from.)
Anyway, I pulled this book off the shelf. I opened it up. And I observed something that collided with the handful of years I’d spent learning to play violin.
He puts important lines in a paragraph all of their own.
Is he the only author to do this? No. Was he the one who invented this? Hell no. But he was an author who A) wrote in my genre, B) was good enough to be published professionally and get one hell of a marketing push behind him, and C) the author whose book helped me realize that punctuation and white space in fiction serves the same function as a rest notes in music.
Most questions like “How do I do dialogue?” and “How do I describe my character doing This Thing?” can be answered by opening a book in your genre and looking. And if the first example you find doesn’t answer your questions, you can crack open a different book and compare that. And if you still have questions, start opening more books. Look at what they are ALL doing collectively, and start to compare/contrast what sort of info the author provides, what sort of scene is set, what characters are present, how much/how little dialogue is there, etc.
Also keep in mind that they are published, using the variety of techniques they use. What that means is even if you think an author did it poorly–it wasn’t poorly enough to be edited out of the book, or nix the book entirely. And if authors solve the problem in several ways, then there are several ways YOU can solve the problem in YOUR story.
If you keep surveying books in your genre, and keep comparing them, and keep trying to figure out why an author did what they did, and why it was/wasn’t effective (in my example above, the thing in the book collided with my knowledge of rest notes in music to make me understand), there is a LOT to be learned.
It’s not always easy, or fast. But it can teach you pretty throughly in ways an attempted explanation from another person may not. Because you can keep going over the book(s) in front of you and you can see the context a scene is set within and keep mulling over examples until you come to a conclusion, or something you want to try out for yourself.