I saw a mini-blowup on Twitter last week that arose because a publishing professional had the temerity to suggest that anyone seeking publication should be very well read.
Apparently this is still a controversial opinion in some circles!
Look. If you don’t read books, no one is going to take away your laptop and lock you up to stop you from writing a book. You’re welcome to do what you wish with your time. I also think it’s fine to temporarily suspend reading new books within your genre of choice as you try to hone your own voice. Temporarily.
There are very few ironclad rules in writing and publishing, but this is one of them: you can’t be a good writer if you don’t read. Period. Full stop. I will not be taking questions.
You’re welcome to write! You’re even welcome to try your hand seeking publication. Your odds of success are just going to be abysmal.
When I was an agent, some of the easiest rejections were when people tipped me off that they weren’t well-read.
Don’t make these mistakes:
“No one has ever written anything like this before”
Sometimes authors try to impress an agent with their work’s originality and suggest that no one has ever written anything like what they’ve written.
This became almost like a fun at-work parlor game. Whenever someone suggested their book was completely unlike anything that’s ever done before, I would quickly try to name at least three books published within the last ten years that were similar.
Chances are you haven’t written something completely unlike anything that’s been written before. And that’s okay!
Besmirching other books on the market
In a spirit of false camaraderie, sometimes authors will suggest that the agent is probably tired of reading whole subgenres of books or, worse, suggest that everything being published these days is crap.
If you think everything published these days is bad you definitely aren’t reading very much.
And, oh by the way, you’re also insulting that agent’s hard work in the process. If you think everything is crap, what about the agent’s clients?
Outdated comps
Imagine that your new book is like a startup and an agent is like your first investor. Now imagine trying to pitch an investor on a new business idea because it worked great for IBM in the 1950s. That’s what it sounds like to an agent when you anchor to books that were published a long time ago.
The world has changed since those classic books were published. Yes, classics are classics for a reason, it’s great to take bits and pieces from them like CEOs get nuggets from Jack Welch, but books need to appeal to today’s readership.
It’s okay to include a throwback comp or two, but make sure at least one of your comps was written/produced and successful in the past five years.
You have to read in order to write
The most successful authors are the ones who treat publishing like their second (or even first) career. And like any other job that means staying abreast of the competition, working extremely hard at your craft, and keeping up with your chosen industry.
If you just want to write purely as a hobby, have at it! I’m not judging. But if you want to publish: read like there’s no tomorrow.
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Art: Interieur Burg Kreuzenstein, Bibliothek by Franz Poledne
And reading is so pleasurable!
Agreed! I think the most important piece of writing advice, by far, is studying other people’s writing.
It’s hard to read when you are fighting to have any time at all to write, but it can be managed. Writers should look for authors who write what they want to write, and they should always read the newer, more successful authors because they show what the market/publishers/agents are looking for. Authors who have been around forever write what they want, and some haven’t tried a new thing in years so they aren’t a good example to follow. Finding those right authors is a long subject in itself.
Bravo, Nathan. Well written! Reading as a writer is one of the most important sources of learning for me. How does a particular author handle humor, dialog, action, inner voice, point of view, on and on? I can’t believe there’s actually a controversy about this!
My chosen genre for fiction writing is broadly SF/Fantasy, and I read much recent work in that genre, but also books from other genres and times, including non-fiction. All such reading can inform and enliven my own fiction. Focus is good, but also breadth. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, in writing as elsewhere, and present-day authors are telling stories that are both timely and traditional and well worth our time and attention.
My grammar professor in college used to say that we already knew grammar, it was inherent in the language. He would give us a sentence and have us write our own mirroring the same parts and then diagram it. I remember doing one and not knowing how to diagram one of the words, however, I was still able to write a similar sentence. He pointed out, that even though I couldn’t name the grammar term, I knew how to use it. I think this same theory holds true for reading. We pick up so much writing craft, simply by reading.
It does seem to be a matter of controversy, especially among younger writers (I use the term loosely). A few months back I joined a NaNoWriMo Facebook group for camaraderie and was rather quickly taken aback by the assertions made by many in the group who argued that reading other authors’ works was absolutely not necessary to succeed as a writer; in fact, to even suggest the need to actively read was considered by many as elitist and condescending. Mind you, these were the same people who slammed any and all respect for the rules of grammar, labeling anyone who abided by said rules, even if just loosely, as a “prescriptivist,” a term this particular group flung, like poison darts, at anyone who even hinted at the importance of basic grammar in writing and communicating effectively. I left that group, needless to say. More recently, I stumbled into another writers’ group on FB, one devoted to how to make money by self-publishing through Amazon. I was surprised by the number of people in this group who are approaching writing as solely a means of making money–people who were *writing* by the process of simply recording their verbalized thoughts then transcribing their thoughts to digital paper using a voice-to-text software program. This method of *writing*, they boasted, allowed them to write up to 10K words per day and publish 1-3 books per month on Amazon. One woman reported she spent 8 hours a day recording her novel and another 3-4 line editing the transcribed text for typos and clarity. Every day. This type of schedule leaves little time for eating, peeing, belching and sleeping, let alone time for extracurricular reading. How much attention to detail, massaging of syntax, or commitment to quality can there possibly be when one publishes 1-3 novels per month?
I’ve never heard of this and am appalled. This isn’t “writing” at all and shouldn’t be accepted as such by Amazon. But its raison d’etre is money, so we should expect little else. An aspiring writer/author certainly could gain nothing from reading this sort of thing. It would be like trying to find a gourmet dinner at McDonald’s. My question is: Is it possible to detect that such a book has been written in this manner? Whether it is or not, to me this is little more than gaming the system to flood the market with more trash. [Sigh.]
I would assume you could tell by the writing quality. If it was good, I don’t think it’d matter if it was written voice-to-text. It’s really more about the editing, which it sounds like some of them aren’t doing enough of. I would think that there would be burnout at that pace after a while. I can’t imagine there’s big money in it, at least not for most of them.
An aspiring writer “could” learn what not to do.
When I started writing, I read a lot of bad fanfiction. I could usually reverse engineer why something wasn’t working easier than I could figure out why something was working. The worse the fiction, the more glaring the issues, making it easier for a beginner to recognize them. Assuming the beginner can tell it’s bad.
I’ve heard of people attempting to write a novel when they haven’t actually read much since the back-cover blurbs in high school (instead of reading the entire novel) to write a required book report. That said, I’ve never actually met anyone who’s done this. There is a part of me that didn’t believe people like this existed. I guess because writing a book when you aren’t even a reader seems absurd. After all, would a contractor try to build a building if they had never looked at one, studied it, and analyzed the blueprints to see what goes into constructing the building? Crazy.