: 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

@Bryan361

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Congratulations on being a natural mimic! That is a marvelous skill to have as a fiction writer. Now all you have to do is learn how to leverage it. I'll give you a few clues here.

Unconscious mimicry is incredibly useful when your plot demands a dramatic diversion from your comfort zone. For example, you may be very skilled at high-speed, high-action fight scenes. You might have a gift for keeping your reader's heartrate accelerated and making the pages flash by. This is your natural style that you are trying so hard to defend. ...and you are absolutely right, it deserves to be defended because it makes your writing your own.

But stories aren't all action and adreneline. Eventually your characters need to do something else; maybe some dialog or an lurid love scene. Eventually, in your quest to write a complete story, you'll have to write some scenes that aren't in your comfort zone.

That is when being a mimic is a blessing. There are a lot of great writers out there, but each and every one of them is BEST at only one or two types of scenes. Start cataloging your favorite authors' strong points then use their writing to inject those skills into your writing at the moment when you need that kind of help. Eventually, you will have a library of earmarked books waiting to help you write every kind of scene imaginable. And because of your skill at mimicry, you can use that library to enrich everything that you write. Reading the right 5-10 pages from an expert in a particular type of scene, can elevate you into a master of that scene type as well. Mimicry! Embrace it!

That leaves you with one issue, the original issue from your question. Outside of the scenarios described above, how do you keep what you read from effecting what you write? The answer should come naturally to a mimic...

Right before you start writing, read 5-10 pages of what you have recently written. This will reset your mimicry, making you into a mimic of yourself. It will also serve to get you back into the mood and flow of your current writing, and remind you of plot elements which you might have forgotten since the last time you wrote.

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