: Re: How important is being well read for a writer Back in the mists of time, I would put a lot of time into reading, and would read pretty much anything I could lay my hands on. Then I started

@Carla500

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Be well read in the genre in which you wish to write.

Every genre has its clichés. A writer could produce the best-written story imaginable and still have it rejected by editors and readers if they say, "oh, not that old chestnut again." Conversely, there is nothing wrong with building on the work of the greatest past authors in your chosen genre. Obviously by "building on" I do not mean plagiarism; I mean letting the virtues of the fiction that you have most liked reading be filtered and transformed by your own imagination into the fiction that you write. You say you are happy to reinvent the wheel - so why not invent a better wheel?

As an example, many, many authors have done "locked room" mysteries in detective fiction. If you haven't read much detective fiction then your locked room mystery is likely to be rejected as just another one in the same old style. But if you are familiar with the past of this sub-genre and manage to pull off a new twist on an old idea, then people will love it.

I, too, suffer from the style of what I have just read infecting what I write so that it can come across as a parody of the other author. The solution is not to stop reading but to put the "infected" piece of writing away for a while, then come back to it later when the passage of time lets you view it more objectively and re-write it.

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