Should I write a novel if I haven't read many?

Many will say what you're striving to do is impossible because you won't have seen enough tricks of the trade in use, but I'll do my best to suggest a way forward that doesn't boil down to, "read N books because that sounds like enough". I'll still end up telling you to do some reading (by which I mean "or use an audiobook if you prefer; I'm not your mother").

• What "tropes" is your fantasy likely to use? How have people played with them in the past? Is there anything "standard" that has become so stale you want to do something different? Start your reading here.
• Do some research by your preferred method on the most common problems with beginners' writing, so you have a rough idea for how you're supposed to write. At this stage, my hope is this will ensure your pacing is about right, because you'll need that for the bullet point below; but your writing will have to refine a lot before that.
• You need a word count estimate. (Write a very detailed chapter summary of your intended plot, and if necessary redraft Chapter 1 as closely to the "rules" you've learned as possible in terms of pacing.) Find another work of about the same scale (word counts are easy to Google) and read that, or if it's very long at least read about its structure, to see whether in doing so you learn anything about structuring a work of that size. People were right to warn you about Goosebumps, not out of word-count snobbishness but because what you intend to write will almost certainly be so much longer than those stories as to have very different structural requirements.
• Now you know what work yours may be most like at least in terms of structure, put aside writing it altogether for the moment, as you've still a lot to learn and what you wrote now may need to be extensively redrafted. (This is often necessary with Chapter 1, anyway; I only asked you to write it for a word count estimate.) Read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read and try to apply its techniques to learning what other great books did right. It might just allow you to do that without reading them in their entirety. I have a number of reservations about the book's ideas myself, but if what you're hoping to achieve is possible this is your best chance. To quote Jorge Luis Borges's review of Ulysses, "I confess that I have not cleared a path through all 700 pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes."
• Now you know how long your work will likely be, how it is to be structured and what some do's and don'ts are, design a timetable for when you'll write the first draft, which will take ages. You may need to first plan some characters' personalities to ensure the plot that flows thereafter doesn't have them do anything they wouldn't, and you may need to write another chapter to see how quick you are; but I'll leave all that to you. If you can also timetable redrafting after that, so much better. But once all that work is behind you, be warned: even great writers usually have to write several novel-length stories before they're skilled enough for their work to be publishable by traditional routes. So if your heart is set on publishing this particular story, either practise with some others first or else be prepared for extensive redrafting one day.

posted about 7 years ago

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J.G.‭

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I do not have enough knowledge about the book-reading community as to what pleases them.

What pleases them is what you see published and sell, they wouldn't buy it and read it if it did not please them.

Note there is a distinct cause and effect here: They don't like it just because it got published! It got published because editors thought it would sell and make money, and they have been reading all day, every day, for ten years or more and know the business of what the book-reading community really likes enough to buy.

If you like the books you read, and can write a book like that, then do it. Use the book as a reference. It will show you the proper way to format dialogue, for instance. (You can search or ask here for advice on things not done in your book.)

It will show you what dialogue looks like, see how the author intersperses attribution (who said it), descriptions of what characters are thinking, feeling, or doing, and the actual text of what they said.

Look in your book for when characters are introduced,* and see how the author did that for each of them. How much description do they get? Some introduce characters with nearly zero, and leave the description up to the imagination of readers.

You can go further, to see structure and pacing. Before "structure", find "scenes": Just like on TV, a scene is characters doing something and interacting in one continuous chunk of time, usually in one place, that advances the story.

Summarize scenes without the drama: "Hagrid comes to Harry's House, to tell him he is going to Wizard's School (Hogwarts)."

Like on TV or a movie, a scenes vary in length and can be long or short. In Star Wars, the scene of Luke fighting Vader is long. The length is for dramatic effect, the summary is "Luke has a light saber duel with Vader and loses badly. Vader cuts off his hand. Luke learns Obi Wan lied to him: Vader did not kill his father, Vader is his father."

A short scene is Leia confessing her love for Hans Solo before he is frozen in Carbonite. All scenes DO something, either making the characters do something in response (including go other places), or change the characters in some way (give them knowledge or understanding, new feelings, new experiences (good or bad) or cost them something.)

A summary of the scenes will show you a summary of these changes. Together for a character we call that an "arc", how a character changed from when they were first introduced to the last scene they appear in.

Characters that don't change in the story, appear in only a few scenes (like a store clerk) are props. In many cases they can do double duty: Not just a store clerk, but comical, or they illustrate something about the culture, technology, attitudes, religion, and so on. Or they may be props to be killed, to prove the villain is one bad ass dude.

The reason for doing this analysis? It becomes a lesson in writing a book you liked, that was part of your inspiration to write.

So copy it. Or more accurately, emulate it. These summaries of scenes show you how a professional, published-for-pay, popular author structures a story. How complications are introduced, how characters are introduced and taken away. Importantly, note how characters fail in the story, a story with just one success after another can be boring.

More specifically boring to readers: We call those "wish fulfillment" stories to be kind, or "mental masturbation" to be mean: They satisfy nobody but the author's fantasies of a perfect life. For a story to be interesting it must have conflict and the reader must believe the MC (main character) is at risk and may not succeed. Something or someone must stand in the way of their success. It could be the environment, e.g. say the MC is mugged by a sketchy taxi driver in a foreign country and winds up in a ditch in some unknown corner of India with no passport, identification, money, luggage or even shoes. It could be a villain, specific or not, e.g. the MC witnessed a mob murder, and now mobsters have sent people to kill her.

The last thing to notice in this book is perhaps the most important thing to get right. You will find it on this site as "Show don't Tell". Notice what types of things the author describes (shows the reader) and what kinds of things are just told to the reader.

Summaries can help here, too. You can summarize descriptions into something short and pithy, like "the author could have just written the landscape is beautiful and awe inspiring." But instead she spent a page describing mountains, forests, lakes, ice caps.

Or there was a description of action that shows you Harry is very mad, when she could have just said that: "Harry is very mad, so mad he frightens Sarah."

If you can summarize paragraphs of exposition like that, it means you should not. These are examples of where you should describe things and not just tell them. These help the reader imagine these scenes and feelings, where simply telling them "Harry is very mad" does not help them imagine much of anything, at best a facial expression. This is why the author describes things they could have summarized, to help the reader imagine the experience, not just understand the fact that Harry is very mad. Facts don't last long in the reader's mind, imagined experiences do.

So pay attention to where the author describes things they could have summarized as a simple fact, and where they just state simple facts (because the experience was not too important to the story). For example, "The bellman hailed a taxi, and she arrived at the airport with an hour to spare." The taxi driver, the smell and appearance inside the taxi, any dialogue they had, the traffic, the sights along the way, whether she tipped him: All unimportant to the story and skippable, so just a sentence of "telling" of a connecting fact to get her from the hotel to the airport is all we need: she took a taxi.

Note the TYPES of things the author "shows" (tries to give you an imagined experience) instead of telling, and tells (imparts a fact the reader likely needs to not wonder what the hell just happened) instead of showing. You want to emulate that too.

It can be more difficult. One of the biggest mistakes of beginners is to tell when they should have shown, e.g. "John was the most attractive guy in the school." In published stories, such facts are seldom stated, they are shown: If it is true, it should have consequences, things happen to John, people interact differently with him, he has a different attitude toward them. Perhaps he exploits his good looks to get what he wants and is successful where other guys would fail miserably. The reason it can be difficult to spot is because the author, having shown you John is the most attractive guy, may never ever tell you that John is the most attractive guy. At most, some character tells another character this, or perhaps a character resents it (telling somebody "He is not that good looking!"), or wishes him harm because of it. But the "fact" is never baldly stated. That is why you summarize, to get to the fact of what the author is trying to convey, and then you can see how such a fact is shown and never told.

You do not have to read a hundred books before you write. You do need intellect, but one bestseller that you personally like and admire is enough: It contains all you need to get started, from formatting to plotting to many examples of what professional writing looks and feels like. You can take it apart, piece by piece, along with a search or two. Don't think of it as a work of art, think of it as a machine, and by Google or on this site, you can learn how all the parts of this machine work to make something fun to read and worth buying.

posted about 7 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3166 reputation 2 1399 614 37

In all the author biographies I have read, two things seem to be constant. They are all voracious wide-ranging readers, and they all (or almost all) started writing in some form at a very early age. It follows that they cannot have been widely read at the time they started writing. Wide extensive reading was clearly part of their development as a writer.

This makes sense. A novel is the most complex piece of art that humans create (far more complex than a movie). You are not going to learn to put all the pieces together in a way that sustains continuous interest and leads to a compelling conclusion without many false starts. Writing will change how you read. As you struggle to achieve some effect in your own work, you will start to read with speciaL attention to that effect in the work of others.

The corpus of literature will become the food you consume to sustain you in your development as a novelist. But just as an athlete needs food to sustain them, but cannot operate by gorging until they are hugely fat before they start training, training and nutrition must go hand in hand.

Read, write, repeat.

posted about 7 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4381 reputation 12 1104 745 58

Although the other answers here are great, I feel a more direct answer to your question is important.

Should you write, even if you have not read many books?

Absolutely!

Write to your heart's content. You'll find it will make you want to read more. I started writing when I was a child - by dictating it to my mother - I could not have read any books by that point.

Write and keep writing, especially if you enjoy it.

posted about 7 years ago

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Erdrik Ironrose‭

45 reputation 2 8 9 0

I will start my answer from a slightly different angle than the question originally proposed. You are asking whether or not you should write a novel, and specify the purpose as writing a book with a good reception by the book-reading community, so I will start off by answering the question "Will I be able to write a novel that will be well-received by the book-reading community without reading a lot of other novels?"

The answer to that question is most likely no, at least at first. Writing is a craft, and reading other books can help you understand how others do it. But the most important activity in learning any craft is conscious training. If you start writing your novel now, you will most likely not be satisfied by the result yourself, the same would be true for an editor. (There are books with terrible style out there which got published for their interesting stories alone, but they are a minority.)

However, you will identify a lot of problems in writing the story. You might notice that you do not understand how to properly open dialogues without being awkward, or how and when to weave in world desciptions, or how to build in plot twists and hide them from the reader, or any number of other problems that a proficient writer might be able to solve.

Now when you have identified these problems, you will be able to identify the solutions to them in other novels more easily. You will be able to learn from others more consciously, so after you have tried writing a novel yourself, you will be able to learn how to write from others a lot faster.

If you look at it from a more general perspective, you should practice your craft, but you should also look around and see the work of others. If you aimed to be a mason, you might want to just start by building a wall and see what results you can up with, realize the structural weaknesses of the wall and then turn to look at the techniques that others came up with. Others might learn better by watching a wall being built by masters and then trying to imitate them. There are different ways of learning, and you will have to apply your individual way of learning.

Of course writing is also an art, and finding your own style is important, but the underlying techniques can be learned from others.

I believe that you should start writing if you want to become a good writer, and not be discouraged by not so great first results. But you should also try to understand how others achieved what you are trying to achieve, and read other novels.

posted about 7 years ago

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Umbozz‭

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