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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45959
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45959
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Obviously you have to read, but you don't have to read a LOT.

The lessons for writing are distilled into non-fiction books on writing, usually by authors of multiple best-sellers.

It is actually a little difficult to extract rules of plotting and characterization from reading books, the plot and characterization are better taught, not by example, but by explicitly tutoring the distilled version of how to do it.

Another approach is to not read fiction for entertainment, but to open it up and scan for particular things similar to what you want to do. If you have a lot of dialogue to put across, find a passage in a book, written by a multiple best-selling author, and analyze how _they_ accomplished that feat without boring the reader.

The same goes for a lengthy description of a setting; look for something with very little dialogue and a lot of exposition.

The same goes for writing a battle, or a sex scene. Of course both of those have their own non-fiction books on how to write them, or examples of them. Google for them.

We don't teach medical students surgery by just telling them to watch a few dozen surgeries and then jump in with a scalpel. We don't teach engineers to build bridges by looking at a lot of bridges.

We teach them the theory of biology and surgery, or the theory of building bridges, long before we have them look at actual surgery or actual bridges. The same can go for writing. Read on the theory of forming a story, what is important to that. Read on the theory of writing.

If you love to write, learning the theory should should be engaging to you; you have immediate application for it. Then follow the examples and try to apply what you've done in writing. You won't avoid reading best selling fiction altogether, but IMO it is bad advice to just tell people read a hundred books and then write one, just as bad as telling an engineer to go look at 100 bridges by themselves, try to figure out what is important by themselves, and then design an original bridge by themselves.

The result would be either a patchwork of plagiarisms from existing bridges, or a disaster, or both.

Theory first, examples of "what worked" are only useful once you can generalize them back to the **theory,** because it is the generalized **theory** you need to apply to your own specific work; not just plagiarizing somebody else's application of the theory.

Original score: 7