Post History
Many authors avoid reading – or reading anything even remotely related to what they write – while they are writing, to avoid being influenced by the ideas and style of other writers. My recommendat...
Answer
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:47:23Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25509 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T05:47:23Z (over 4 years ago)
Many authors avoid reading – or reading anything even remotely related to what they write – while they are writing, to avoid being influenced by the ideas and style of other writers. My recommendation would be to **abstain from reading in your own and related genres while you write** , because it is near to impossible not to be influenced by what you read. At the same time, I consciously read authors whose _language_ I want to influence my own while I write. Usually these are classic authors who do not write genre fiction (as I do), so there is no danger of taking anything but language from these examples. If you want to read while you write – and writing a novel can take a long time, so not reading anything at all might not be how you want to live during those months –, consider non-fiction, classics, or complementary genres (such as reading horror when writing love stories).
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2016-12-11T10:31:55Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 3