What can you learn from it? Are there similar patterns in your books? Can you use those patterns to sell books, or do they work against you? Richelle Mead is an example of this—forbidden love is a theme in many of her books. This is something her readers have come to expect from her along with the fantasy element , and she can therefore use this as a selling point. To read like a writer we must challenge ourselves. But these challenges teach us about ourselves, our audience, and our stories.
Some genres have very different stylings to others. However, there are always overlaps. Romance, teaches us about love; that feeling we have when we first meet someone special.
Nonfiction gets a bad rep for being boring, but it can be as inspiring and heart-wrenching if not more so, because you know the events are true , than any fiction book. With the exception of a couple of books, I finish every book I read. Possibly even more beneficial than reading books we love. Even things we deeply hate have positive traits to them. Scenes, characters, and even entire books can be read completely differently by the closest of friends. Make sure the books they read are appropriate to what you write though.
Set yourself a reading goal just a little outside of your usual comfort zone, and use this to motivate yourself. Aim for something realistic but challenging, like 24 if you usually read 12, or 36 if you usually read You can either do this in your book journal, or leave a review on Goodreads.
What tips do you have on reading like a writer? Kristina Adams is an author of fiction and nonfiction, writing and productivity blogger, and occasional poet. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.
Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. Still curious? Read Next. Reading Reading Time: 6 minutes. Who to Read In an article Hemingway wrote for Esquire in , he recounts the advice he gave an aspiring writer known as Maestro, Mice for short.
Mice: What books should a writer have to read? I say what he should. Mice: Well what books are necessary? How many more are there? There are about three times that many. Mice: Should a writer have read all of those? Or do they write more than they read? In today's world, unless a person is serious about writing and dedicated to reading it can be difficult to find the time to do either.
People today have many commitments and the world offers many distractions. Once a commitment to writing is made it can be a long time before a person starts writing anything of quality and, as a consequence, young writers often spend years escaping into other people's fiction in lieu of writing themselves. Then, magically, they might develop a talent for expressing their ideas in language; their ideas might not be any good, but the practice of constructing sentences around those ideas becomes far less painful.
At this point, a writer might start writing more and more each day, and reading a little less. I was talking about this recently with the American novelist Elise Blackwell.
She said, "I think heavier reading is essential for young writers, but, like you, I moved into more writing than reading. The balance of my reading and writing shifts across the year, and I suspect I'd read four hours a day if I didn't have a day job.
You might be a detailed reader, meticulously taking in each and every single word. You might even be a chapter-hopper, jumping straight to only the sections that sound interesting to you. Bill Gates is highly committed and attentive when it comes to his reading habits. That means I sometimes spend more time reading a book that I can't stand than a book that I love.
Reading like a writer can help strengthen your skills in communication and storytelling. More importantly, it can help you to become a more persuasive person, which is an essential skill to have if you're trying to convince someone you're right, pitch an idea or sell yourself for a job you really want. The goal of every writer is to really draw you into their idea — they want you to be engaged, committed and convinced that their words are worth reading.
Fiction writers do this by creating captivating plots and relatable characters. Non-fiction writers do this by gathering data and facts and putting it together in an authoritative way. The best writers know how piece together certain concepts and information in a way that can hack into different parts of a reader's brain.
A study published in NeuroImage asked "participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI machine.
Whenever participants read words like "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex the part of your brain that processes "smell" lit up like fireworks on the fMRI machine. Words like "velvet" activated the sensory cortex which processes "feelings" of the brain. Researchers concluded that in certain cases, the brain can make no distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.
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