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.
Not my genre in specific, but reading the Suzumiya Haruhi light novels taught me that to be a good writer, I also need to be a good reader.
The number of references to other SF works was astounding. So I decided to read more and more, not only about SciFi, but fantasy and literary fiction as well.
It’s like tasting a lot of dishes before starting to cook your own.
Yeah, I’ve found it’s very fun to put those little homages and references in–epecially when it’s Deep Genre. I like doing it as a writer, and I like it just as much when I recognize such an homage in a book I’m reading. It’s kind of like having an in-joke between you and the author.
But more to your point–yeah, you really need to taste a lot of dishes first. Experience the whole writing and genre “ecosystem”, so you can start to get a handle on what YOU want to add to it, and how it plays in with the rest.
Semi-related…
Something that was a pretty profound thought for me was the realization that readers generally don’t read just ONE book. They read lots of books. And that means, as a writer, I don’t have to write the Book To End All Books, sating every possible desire a reader might want. It’s actually ok for me to go really weird and niche. Because I’m part of an entire ecosystem, and readers read widely, and they won’t NEED to get “their everything” from me. They just want ME to do one or two things really well.
Realizing that there’s a whole ecosystem of books out there, like a bunch of wildly different flowers to pick, made me relax a lot in certain ways as a writer. Kind of helped perfectionist urges to settle down.