F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his daughter wrote, "A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen topflight authors every year."
All writers must read not only to be entertained but to be instructed. It is by reading that we learn to focus the fiction mind, framing incidents and characters and places into a particular shape of imagery and economy that makes a short story, a play, or a book.
The fiction writer's eye is not much different from a camera lens. We eliminate extraneous detail, focus on a particular plane of a face or a scene, then describe these by using all the senses at our command. If we must lean upon only our own experiences, our work comes out as shallow and dry as a piece of newspaper reporting. Who, What, When, Where, and Why? Oh, no, fiction writing is more than cold facts. Fiction writing, and I've learned this from reading, includes the flesh and blood of humanity, all the glory of nature, and puts characters into delightful or grave situations we deem important to the story we are writing.
Since childhood, I've read everything I could get my hands on. From books, fiction and nonfiction, I've learned techniques of successful writing: the use of dialogue, the description of place, how to characterize, how to turn an original metaphor or simile. I've learned that literature has three dimensions: breadth, depth, and elevation. Breadth comes from our experience, but also recognition that this experience is shared with other writers. Depth, is understanding and is limited only by the inquiring mind and energy of the writer. Elevation is the distance we travel with our subject matter--its meaning, its symbolism, the larger and wider view from which we may survey all that has been done before.
In reading I've found that I can discover springboards that fire my own imagination in ways never before thought of. Some passage by Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Mary Higgins Clark, or Dean Koontz can suddenly spark an energy in my mind that allows the words to flow in a torrent of prose that is my own yet inspired by others.
Hallie and Whit Burnett in their book, FICTION WRITER'S HANDBOOK (Harper & Row) say that writers must read and read some more, so that your bloodstream is charged by the alcohol of fiction and you come, at last, to feel and see and believe in the visions that fill your head.
Too many of us confine our reading to the bestseller lists. We forget that in the mid-list areas there are great writers who simply do not have the publicity they deserve to get their works out to the people. Stroll through a book store, look for intriguing titles by authors you've never read. Read a few pages, see if this author might have a bit of magic to send your way. Some special knowledge of turning a commonplace thing into something that sparkles like champagne.
As for the classic notables: I have learned much from reading Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Truman Capote, D. H. Lawrence, Isak Dinesen, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Austen, Philip Roth, Eudora Welty, George Orwell, James Michener, Hemingway, and William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, William Styron, and one of my favorites, Somerset Maugham. Today's authors like John Jakes, Herman Wouk, Pat Conroy, and Gore Vidal are true inspirations in their genres.
Also, I've found many helps in the works of Mary Higgins Clark, Nora Roberts, Margaret Moseley, and twenty or thirty other contemporary authors who've taught me wondrous things I'd never thought about in my quest to become a fiction writer.
Writers should read because unless they experience the works of others they may never be able to write anything of value in such a way that readers will want to read their words. Writing is not easy as some would have you believe. Writing is hard work, it is a business, and it comes from so deep within that it may take years of reading and learning before anyone is successful. We must assimilate, not emulate, others' works.
No one can teach you to write. Novels, short stories, biographies, nonfiction works, they can show you how others do it and why certain forms are used, certain phrases work when others do not. A writing teacher does not actually teach writing, he or she inspires you, the writer, to reach down inside of yourself and pull up those emotions that evolve into a bit of writing that is true to your own potential.
Do I still read? Does the sun still come up in the East? I've spent almost ten years being a literary critic in order to read all the best books available. Does my own work sound or look like some other author's? I should hope not. The fiction and nonfiction I've read gathers in my mind and presents me with a world of skills, dreams and possibilities. They open my writer's soul to the realization that all things are possible in fiction, and not all nonfiction needs to follow a formula.
In conclusion, if you would be a writer, there is a prerequisite, you must become a reader. A reader who learns and retains the infinite details of pure writing. Only then do you dare to let your muse fly free to express in your own vision the stories collecting in your mind's eye.
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(Jones is a book critic for The Tulsa World, Tulsa, OK, and The Camden Times, Camden, New York.)
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