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 can’t think of a specific book right now, but I do this frequently. On my first reading of a book, I am typically absorbed in the story and don’t pay a lot of attention to the technique. After that, though, I enjoy digging in and making notes on things that jump out as being well done. I agree that it’s a great way to improve your own craft.
I know you said you can’t think of a specific book, but what’s one specific thing you remember learning this way?
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.
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.
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.
