Writer Toolbox: Reading like a Writer, Part 1/2
how to ask novels lots of probing questions about themselves
I believe it’s time to duck into a cul-de-sac of craft talk. See reasons 1 & 2:
a lot of you guys have asked for more long craft posts.
I don’t want to just talk about what I learned from reading 100 top-selling novels;* I want to talk about how I gleaned my conclusions, so that folks can go out and harvest their own.
An arguably more useful goal, really.
*Recap: Post 1 in my 100 top-selling novels series was about how I defined a top-selling novel. Post 2 talked about subtle genre cues. Post 3 dove into how important organization was.
So let’s talk about learning how to write from existing novels. It’s a wonderful trick, if you can pull it off. It’s cheap (anyone with a library card can do it). It’s unbiased (you can wallow around in any genre you choose). It’s full of starry big names (even the dead ones can still teach you something). And it’s plentiful (because you don’t need to like a book in its entirety to learn something from it).
