This page is still under construction, and will be added to in the near future.
Reading
All that advice about reading a lot if you want to be a writer? Absolute rubbish… nah, just kidding. Turns out it’s true. Reading widely and extensively pays back in so many ways.
Reading within the genre helps to appreciate which speculative veins in the bedrock of ideas have been mined to death and which are still relatively untouched. You can write the most accomplished post-apocalyptic, earth-as-a-ravaged-nuclear-wasteland tale, but unless you’re Cormac McCarthy you’re going to struggle to get it accepted without a high-dose of originality. Same with stories about unhinged robots, goth vampires, and fantasy lands. Additionally, getting a feel for the type of fiction that various markets publish (beyond their guidelines) can save a great deal of time when it comes to submitting work. And audio fiction can be great for getting you into the habit of reading your work aloud.
Reading fiction outside the genre — literary fiction, we might call it — helps to get a sense of the possibilities of language and narrative that aren’t always present in genre fiction. It pains me to say it, but literary fiction, at the sentence level, is generally of a superior quality to what we find in genre. The writing is usually tighter, the metaphors more apt, and the sense of control stronger. On the character side, literary fiction usually creates more rounded, less melodramatic individuals (perhaps because mute settings make it easier to write restrained characters). In short, reading literary fiction can help immensely in making a writer aware of his or her own shortcomings.
Equally, reading non-fiction extensively is just as valuable. First off, much speculative fiction is about drawing the reader away from the familiar and into the extraordinary. The extraordinary might manifest itself in any number of different ways, from unusual social customs to technological advances to the presence of magic to ecological catastrophe. All these tangential ideas didn’t come to their authors out of the aether from nothing. They were all predicated on pre-existing historical or present-day events that were then powerfully and uniquely shaped.
The point is that there are no truly original thoughts–every Earth-shattering idea can be traced back through a long line of mental associations to more mundane fundamentals. What the skilled writer does is mix these elements in such a way as to hide these bonds and make the finished concept feel fresh and untethered. Hence, reading non-fiction — scientific journals, hobbyist works, overviews of historical events, scientific debates etc. — is a fantastic way of collecting ideas without being influenced by attached personal narratives. It is often in the details of these works, that the most interesting plot catalysts are found.
For example, I recently read a great short story in Cosmos Magazine called “Letting Go.” The entire piece rested on the fact that the moon is tidally locked with the Earth (we always face the same side of the moon). This fact meant that boring a shaft through the very centre of the moon, from one side to the other, made sense as a means of transferring mined materials across before being transported back to Earth. With the shaft in place, the story was ready to go. I kicked myself for not seeing the potential.
Finally, reading a wide range of types of writing — newspaper articles, personal letters, diaries, official logs, government statements, word-for-word scripts, investigative journalism — can help to develop a writer’s insight into the minds of certain professionals, gain an appreciation of different tones and voices, and add authenticity to specific passages.
And as Umberto Eco notes to Nassim Taleb in the latter’s book, The Black Swan, building a personal library doesn’t mean reading every single item in the collection; it means having available at any time everything you might need for research. Fortunately, in the age of digital media, we only need access to the web to gain such a library. To this end, a writer should always have access to an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.