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.
Pacing, I think. When I’m not sure if my book is too slow (or too hurried) I look at a few in a similar genre and see if I’m in the ballpark. This works great for genre fiction. For example, I write cozy mysteries, and it’s good to look at other books to see where the first murder takes place. It can vary, but looking at how other people handle it can help me determine if my plan is going to work well.
Yes! I have absolutely done that too. I don’t write mystery, but I write SFF so there’s sometimes fight scenes (or “flee” scenes, lol), and sometimes when I’m scratching my head on how to approach it, I pull a book that I know has a similar scene in it, and I look at how dialog and narration are woven together, and how that sets pacing of the scenes.
So, obviously this technique works for both of us. For figuring out the book-wide pacing, with your cozy mysteries, and also the smaller-scale action-scene pacing that I do.