Muselina347 - I Can't Be All By Myself Anymore. It's Too Hard.

© Paul Wetherell 

Things I Learned About Writing By Reading

New writers often ask, "Do I have to read if I am going to write?"

After teaching university English and more recently writing fiction and non-fiction, my answer is, "No. However, by reading you learn more quickly, and you may come across pointers you might not discover on your own."

For instance, here, in no particular order, a few writing tips I learned from reading and where they came from:

From Percy Bysshe Shelley: Verbs are the strongest category of words.

From Sylvia Plath: The right word can make readers think again about even ordinary subjects.

From George Eliot: (specifically, Middlemarch): Psychology is action)

From F. Scott Fitzgerald: The cadence is as important as the narrative.

From Raymond Chandler: The right metaphor describes more clearly than several pargraphs of detailed description.

From George Orwell: Clarity is a writer's first concern.

From Roger Zelazny (This Immortal): A distinct voice carries a story more effectively than action.

Lois McMaster Bujold (A Civil Campaign): Interlocking plots can unify a story.

J. R. R. Tolkien: A sense of place is as important as character or story.

The list is only a selection. It is far from complete. Nor does it have any authority except in my own development as a writer. Others would almost certainly derive other lessons from the sources I mention. And I can't even guess whether I would have reached the same conclusions had I never read these works.

However, what I can say is that diversity of sources is important. The more variety in your reading, the more you can potentially learn. To read is to have more teachers, and the more teachers you have, the more lessons you might learn.

So read, and read again. Your writing will be richer for it.

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