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    Read to Write
    Read to Write
    Read to Write
    Ebook93 pages4 hours

    Read to Write

    By Ellen Behrens

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Struggling to improve your writing -- especially your fiction? Every published book out there can teach us something, if we know what to look for. In Read to Write, you'll find guidelines for selecting examples that fit your needs, then reading them to get exactly what you need to make your fiction better than it is right now. The focus here is on you and the books you want to write. This short guide by award-winning author Ellen Behrens gives you concise, step-by-step instructions on how to take advantage of the world of examples -- good and bad -- that surround you. Best of all, you can start today!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEllen Behrens
    Release dateMay 5, 2021
    ISBN9798201395964
    Read to Write

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      Book preview

      Read to Write - Ellen Behrens

      READ TO WRITE

      Copyright 2021 Ellen Behrens

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, please consider purchasing another book by this author. Conceiving, writing, and publishing a book takes time and effort, neither of which are free. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Introduction

      Recently I battled my way through to the end of a novel. Trying to follow the plot and keep straight a convoluted set of characters in the face of treacherous grammar made we want to close the book after nearly every page. But I knew the writer had invested time and heart in the project, and I wanted to respect the effort by at least finishing the book. Even if I hadn’t seen it mentioned in the author’s biography that this was his first novel, I would have known it in the first chapter.

      I’m not being mean. I’m being honest. Really.

      I devoted many years to being a freelance writer, spent tens of thousands of dollars on an advanced writing degree, and have read more novels than I’ll ever be able to count—many good, more bad; some excellent, and some truly awful.

      The author of this particular book had landed on a story idea that meant a lot to him (he explained the genesis of the plot in an author’s note at the end of the book), and that came through. But along the way he committed some boo-boos that could have been avoided if he had done one thing differently.

      Just one thing.

      Simple. Cheap—and best of all—free!

      That one thing he could have done to improve his book?

      Read more fiction.

      Every piece of writing out there can teach us something, if we know what to look for.

      Francine Prose published an amazing examination of this very methodology in her book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. She uses a lot of examples from classic novels. Her book is a detailed exploration, and I recommend it to everyone aspiring to write literary fiction. But if you’ve flipped through her book and thought, Wow, that’s farther than I want to go right now, this book is intended to help you with the book you want to write, right now.

      You’ll find guidelines for selecting examples that fit your needs, then reading them to get exactly what you need to make your fiction better than it is right now. The focus here is on you and the books you want to write.

      Don’t Ruin It for Me!

      The author of the book I mentioned earlier had certainly read plenty of nonfiction in his life (given his profession), but I couldn’t help wondering how many novels he’d read, especially those similar to the one he’d written.

      If he did read them, he hadn’t absorbed how they were written.

      Maybe he devoured them like a starving maniac, chomping through every word. But if he did, he was reading like a reader, not like a writer.

      If he’d read those books with the writer side of his brain instead of as a reader, he would have learned more than he could ever absorb through hundreds of hours sitting in writing classes, because knowing how to read like a writer means knowing how to see books as examples.

      Yes, examples.

      We’re surrounded by millions of examples of terrific writing. Great novels and earth-shattering short stories sit waiting for us in bookstores and libraries.

      What’s that you say? You love to read and you don’t want that ruined?

      I hear you.

      I felt the same way. I’ve been a reader since Dick and Jane and Spot (those of you who remember them know that’s a long, long time ago). I promise that if you follow the suggestions you get here you won’t lose those delicious moments of losing yourself in a novel, following the characters as if they’re real people running around in actual places instead of in your imagination.

      You’ll keep your love of reading and you’ll get something more. You’ll get the chance to learn from those authors, and when you discover how to truly read between the lines, you’ll love your favorite books even more.

      Yep. And who doesn’t want more to love?

      Learning from the novels and short stories around us—the good, the bad, and the ugly ones—is a fun way to improve your writing. You’ll get to the point where you’ll be watching movies and TV shows differently (and for an example of how this works, see the Bonus Material: Watch It! about how watching the series 24 several times helped me with character development, plotting, and other key elements of fiction), getting more out of them than you ever did before.

      And did I mention it’s free?!?!? (Oh, I did. Worth repeating, though!)

      Key Steps

      There are a few key steps you’ll need to follow for this to work for you.

      Figure out what type of story you’re writing. We’ll jump right into this in the first chapter.

      Decide which examples to use. How to narrow all the possibilities is tackled in Chapter 2.

      Learn how to read those stories or novels as examples. Chapters 3 and 4 give you practical ways to do this.

      Discover how you can transfer what you’ve learned from those examples to your own writing. Chapters 5-7 drill down into the nitty gritty of what this whole manual is about, giving you plenty of examples and instructions for putting what you’re learning from your reading to work in your writing.

      Ready?

      No? Sounds like too much work? Don’t believe me when I say it’s worth it? Think you’re better off spending your time writing than reading?

      Well, okay. I’ll give you a bit of advice from Stephen King, who’s notorious for the number of pages he churns out (good ones, too!):

      If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

      Did you notice that? Not only will you not have the time to write... but you won't have the tools, either.

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