: Re: Should I write a novel if I haven't read many? I have heard people telling that they have read so many books and have a mini library at their houses. I did not read many books (I am 17

@Carla500

Vote Up Vote Down

I can relate to that feeling of knowing I have (or rather, want) to read more, but lacking the time to do so. That said, you do not really need to read a thousand books to start writing, even though it is highly recommendable to read carefully at least some. But by "some", I may mean as little as two books!

The art of writing, be it a novel, a short story, or really any fiction story, is composed of several skills, and not all of them require actually reading to enrich them. At its core, writing a novel is storytelling in a specific format, and you don't even strictly have to actually read anything to know how to tell good stories: movies, comics (maybe some reading required), the stories your parents would tell you at night before going to sleep, TV shows, cartoons and anime, crazy lies... all of them tell stories, some of them without using words at all. Of course, being different mediums implies they don't share the same format as novels, but you can learn storytelling without ever touching a book, or maybe without even consuming fiction, if you enjoy sharing life experiences and anecdotes with people. You should also analyze tropes (not the TVTropes meaning of trope, as that's generally just an euphemism for clichés and staples) and read a bit about symbolism; while these are not strictly necessary, they help enrich your story, but getting them right is a combination of reading a lot, intuition and feedback.

Storytelling is a rather vague and overarching skill. It is composed of several minor skills, such as pacing, emotion and timing.

Pacing helps you know when to accelerate the story forward or when to lay back and let the purple prose and lengthy descriptions do their job even though we know the answer to that is "never". It helps keeping the attention of the reader where we want to keep it, because if the story is too slow and seems to halt for what seems like ages, then people will just get bored. However, if you throw too much at the reader in a short timespan, they may become overwhelmed. This depends a lot on the type of story you want to tell, but fantasy stories tend to lean towards the faster side. Ideally, you will alternate between slower and faster segments without getting too far on the extremes. Knowing when to accelerate or decelerate comes from intuition (some things obviously won't work), self-reflection (if you would really, really like to see that in another, chances are you are not the only person in the world to think that way) and emotion.

Usually, when writing, unless you want to send a very clear message, all we want is expressing an emotion. People like feeling things, even if said things don't usually sit well with the general population. For example, almost everyone loves laughing, but pretty much nobody likes crying or feeling sad, yet tragedies exist and are terribly successful. We like to feel, whichever feel it is, so a good story will often include some sort of emotional manipulation (as ugly as that sounds) on the reader. For this, you will need good interpersonal skills or some degree of practical psychology, intuition and, more importantly, self-reflection to understand which is it that makes your heart beat. If you can torture yourself, chances are you are not alone in your cause.

Finally, timing is a more specific subset of pacing. While pacing is all about a vague sense of flow, timing is all about the when. I personally think this is best explained with an example: if you were writing a mystery whoddunit story, you wouldn't point out the assassin at the begginning, and even if you were writing a howcatchem, you wouldn't spill all of the beans at the beginning. Timing is about knowing when to deliver information, when to describe, when to stop describing to leave it for later, etc. As with most other storytelling subskills, you will need to

But a novel is not just about storytelling. Writing a novel requires format and style, which is best picked up by grabbing some novels and carefully analyzing the minutiae of how the book is written. This is a purely technical aspect that probably doesn't directly have an effect on the overall quality of the story, but helps putting your novel up to expected medium standards. Thing is, even though this is expected to be standard for the sake of being standard, there is no defined standard. For example, there may be several ways to format a dialogue between characters, and you are expected to follow those guidelines, but each author has his or her minor variations, so these are a matter of personal style. It is recommended you read some theory on this, as well as analyzing some other novels, or at the very least excerpts.

Then, imagination plays a key role when writing fiction. Specially in the case of fantasy novels, you are expected to imagine a world and keep track of it so everything is consistent according to the rules at play. Without imagination, there may be no conflict or issues to overcome. Without imagination, the characters may not play their traits to their fullest strengths. Imagination is all about "understanding the system" and keeping it working like a machine, and knowing what makes the gears grind.

Originality is a subset of imagination that, while not strictly necessary to be a successful writer (lots of writers have gotten away with "plagiarizing" other people's works), is specially welcome nowadays, moreso in fantasy works! Originality is a hard to explain, but it's basically about attempting to go where few people have gone before while having some taste to know where something has potential and not when you are trying too hard. Many people will tell you that nothing is truly original because that's not how the brain works, but originality is both a learned skill and a mindset: knowing what people have done before helps you know how to combine small pieces of their works into an unrecognizable Frankenstein, but you can only recombine them if you have the mindset of picking them apart and reconstructing them. Locke's Theory of Knowledge and his Complex Ideas more or less talk about this. Counterintuitively, not reading that much may help you be more original, as demonstrated by Christopher Paolini drawing way too much from other fantasy authors in his Inheritance saga, to the point it seems like a parody of the clichés of the genre. As a counterexample, I get my originality from half understanding concepts and plotlines, and trying to make sense of them, so knowing more may even taint the little creativity I have left.

Alright, that sounds nice, but coming from a software development background, you will surely know the best way to improve your programming skills is by... well, programming. You won't get anywhere if all you do is read books without trying the real thing at all, so if I were you, I would worry less about sinking time in theory and more about securing time in practice. If you want to be a writer, becoming a reader should be at best secondary to becoming a writer. In fact, if you want to improve your craft with theory, I would prioritize small, condensed metalinguistic articles on how to write over other people's novels, specially for style matters. In fact, I would spend more time daydreaming than reading other people's works if you want yours to be truly personal and original, and potentially very consistent if you keep hammering and brewing it day and night inside your head.

(0)

Login to post a comment!