On writing: reading

[redgarters]

Maybe it's a sign of how much you've influenced ME, but I could have written the above verbatim! (I'd add @bi_cathy and @CreatingKate to that list.)

I read a lot. At least 2-3 hours a day. Aside from the brilliant Lit writers that have inspired me, I often find myself 'reaching' for things I've read when writing: the poetry of Katherine Phillips and WH Auden; plays by Churchill, Miller and Shakespeare; classics by Austen, Steinbeck and Atwood; modern writers like Emma Robinson and Holly Bourne; and song after song after song.

The OP asked for an example. There's a moment in my very short 'I have seen love' where I wanted to emphasize stillness and I found myself reaching for Steinbeck's cadence when his narrator describes Curry's wife after her death. I wrote:

Steinbeck wrote:

Later in the same story I aped Auden's "Funeral blues":

I have seen love How I love that story, it's absolutely beautiful. I could have added so many author names in there, and you are first on that list T

Same as @THBGato . Could almost copy and paste that paragraph, except that I was already writing but I was focused on the short form, the single scenes that are high on erotism. It was safer to bottle up everything in one or a few short scenes and focus on the height of attraction, and the moments before everything shifts in a relationship.

But reading Wanda, BrokenSpokes, and JC (and briefly helping edit some of JC’s work and seeing her progress behind the scenes) made me realize there was room for much more in erotica. More heart, more complexities, more character development, and more side characters and storylines. They made me want to step outside of that safe zone and try to explore longer stories. That meant changing a lot how I approached writing, what I wrote, and how I wrote things. It also forced me to start writing more smut in my smut, which isn’t always easy for me. My first attempts took 4-5 years to push across the finish line, but it’s become easier/faster since.

I’ll never find the words to explain how much these three influenced my trajectory as a writer.

Reading (and interacting with other writers) is fundamental in gaining the confidence to step outside one's percieved limitations as a writer, in my experience.

As for a concrete example of how reading has infuenced my writing, those Ashley Herring Blake novels inspired me to try to switch pov's. I'd always just done 1st person but decided to try 3rd person pov as a result of reading those books, that handle 3rd beautifully.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I have tendencies toward obsessive behavior and nichedom. Shocking, I know. When I find an author I like, I basically devour everything I can get my hands on. The problem is, I'm also very picky and niche; spectrum life, heyo! There are a great many things I dislike, and only a few things I do. So, when I read for enjoyment, it's a very select catalogue.

But, I also have spent a lot of time reading other people's writings with an eye on providing feedback. That, to me, was about as insightful and eye-opening as anything else. Reading for enjoyment is about immersing yourself in the story, not picking apart style or implicit structures. Reading for feedback requires really digging in and seeing what works, what doesn't, how things works. In essence, popping the hood on a story and rooting around in its guts to see how it's constructed. Doing that, I went back to some of my favorite authors to get a sense for how they operate, and learned quite a lot from that. It makes reading less enjoyable, because it's now focused on tiny things; more about the craft than about the love of reading, but it's an incredibly helpful exercise to see how some of the greats operate. Especially when you read multiple books across the lifetime of their works, seeing how they change and evolve, how they shift voice to tell a story a certain way, what consistent threads exist, the decisions and trimmings and adjustments they make over time as they themselves grew better in their craft (or conversely, lazier and more complacent on their success).

 

[liliput1]

I have tendencies toward obsessive behavior and nichedom. Shocking, I know. When I find an author I like, I basically devour everything I can get my hands on.

I mean isn't nesting behavior a common trait of the archaeopteryx?

But, I also have spent a lot of time reading other people's writings with an eye on providing feedback. That, to me, was about as insightful and eye-opening as anything else.

"By teaching, we learn." - Seneca the Younger

 

[anthrodisiac]

I mean isn't nesting behavior a common trait of the archaeopteryx?

I do line my nests with Terry Pratchett books, just so I can read my favorite pages while I'm sitting on my eggs. A mother's work...

 

[anthrodisiac]

"By teaching, we learn." - Seneca the Younger

This is why I advocate for even newer writers to review other writers' works. It puts their brain in a difference perspective beyond writing or reading. The evaluative process is a very different mindset that can bring a lot of enlightenment when reading through a story with an eye for trying to figure out what is and isn't working. 6 - 12 months is usually when I'd say really start to dig in. I tried nudging people over to Story Feedback, but it's been sparse over there lately.

 

[BeechLeaf]

Modest though you may be, you do have a way with words.

I took this as a compliment on my writing, thank you, then just now I laughed and realized you probably meant it for the actual words I used in my comment:

I am stuck with the little square of ivory I can paint on,

Well yes, it is a pretty good way of expressing a small field of artistry, isn't it? Trouble is, I pinched it from Jane Austen.

In a letter to her nephew she referred to his writings, spirited and full of variety, then said:

How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

 

[StillStunned]

I'm a stalwart believer in the idea that being a good reader helps make one a good writer.

What makes one a "good reader?"

I think it probably starts with having an open mind. Being willing to see the positives even if you don't like the style, subject matter or message.

If you only read things you know you already enjoy, you're shutting your mind to everything else, and essentially putting up roadblocks to your own improvement.

 

[AG31]

just now I laughed and realized you probably meant it for the actual words I used in my comment:

Yup. Well, that Jane Austen... She just can't be beat!

 

[anthrodisiac]

If you only read things you know you already enjoy, you're shutting your mind to everything else, and essentially putting up roadblocks to your own improvement.

Eh, I do this, and I turned out fine.

...what?

 

[liliput1]

I think it probably starts with having an open mind. Being willing to see the positives even if you don't like the style, subject matter or message.

If you only read things you know you already enjoy, you're shutting your mind to everything else, and essentially putting up roadblocks to your own improvement.

I’m starting to think that this gratitude trend is going to turn out not to be a fad. For reading to make you better I think you have to celebrate the good bits of what you’re reading. Essentially taking the author as a mentor. I really like how he describes skies. How she describes the anxiety of whether the other person likes you back, or if they’re just really nice.

Then you can go Be the Change by repeating it, and adding your own modest set of somewhat original ideas as the sizzle to your borrowed steak.

 

[nice90sguy]

My most avid "serious" reading years were in my late teens to mid twenties. Joyce, Barth, Atwood, Dickens, Kesey, Heller.
But throughout my life Ive read comics and Sci Fi, particualrly Vonnegut and the US counterculture people like Tom Disch ("Brave Little Toaster"), Bob Sheckley, John Sladek and Philip K Dick.

I read "The Olympia Reader" which included excerpts of classic erotica by Henry Miller, Pauline Reage, and De Sade, and realised that I preferred the stories in Playboy and the comics of R. Crumb to that stuff.

My writing is influenced by everyone I've mentioned above.

Now I rarely read fiction except on vacation -- so basically two weeks a year. The last book I read was the "quick holiday read" The Rivers of London, which I highly recommend, for anyone who wants a more adult JK Rowling type story.

There's a similar argument about needing to listen to music if you want to be a good musician. I'm not so sure about that, and I'm frankly not sure how much you really need to read in order to be a good writer. Like musical talent, you may just have a story-telling talent, so I wouldn't sweat it.

 

[StillStunned]

Ironically, I realised yesterday that listening to audiobooks was interfering with my thinking-about-my-stories time. I went for my walk without an audiobook, and wrote nearly 1.5k words in the afternoon and evening.

 

[TheLobster]

Ironically, I realised yesterday that listening to audiobooks was interfering with my thinking-about-my-stories time. I went for my walk without an audiobook, and wrote nearly 1.5k words in the afternoon and evening.

Looks like the ultimate answer to this thread, titled “On writing: reading,” is, uhm… don’t?

 

[StillStunned]

The Rivers of London, which I highly recommend, for anyone who wants a more adult JK Rowling type story.

You go wash out your mouth! There's no universe in which that hack deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Rivers of London!

 

[Duleigh]

I read a LOT but what I read is fairly scattered across the word-o-sphere. What I don't read is here at Literotica because i find that yes, other writer's scenes invade mine. I want to make sure my sensibilities remain mine. So outside my three favorite authors are Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, and Lucius Beebe. Dr. Asimov was a master at grand ideas, he was a perfect example of "No Idea is Too Small" His ideas inspired two of my favorite stories Captain Scarlett Saves Mars (Based on The Martian Way) and Captain Scarlett vs The Scrapper (Based on The Billiard Ball) Doctor Asimov got full credit for the original ideas, in fact his stories were mentioned in my story, however I weaponized his ideas, then let the good guy win, because that's part of the game too. Most of all, his writing taught me that Science Fiction MUST contain ACTUAL SCIENCE (sorry Star Trek, Star Wars) and he taught me to go beyond "good enough."

I doubt anyone here has ever heard of Lucius Bebe. He was a historian that wrote history like a poet. He was known among the uppercrust for his outrageous pranks, like bombing J. P. Morgan's yacht Corsair III with toilet paper from a chartered airplane. He would gladly tell anyone who would listen that he had "the sole distinction of having been expelled from both Harvard and Yale, at the insistence, respectively, of the president and dean." Now that's a guy I could love. I HATED college, not the classes but the self-adoring clowns who ran the place. I graduated with honors, but I think that was an act of self-preservation on the dean's part. Lucius was a prankster, historian, journalist, gourmand, and foamer (train nut). His books on railroad history! I could read them until daybreak. He taught me that a historian MUST go past dates and names, a historian must tell the story. When you read his books, you can smell the hot oil and steam, you can taste the coal dust in the air and smell the fire, hear the bark of the locomotive, feel the rocking of the car under your feet. And his writing was done in an Edwardian mastery of the English language. He turned history into poetry, and easily made most other historians sound like robots in need of a lube job.

Of the three authors, I have probably read Sir Terry (or as we called him on USENET "PTERRY") the most. Not only because of the humor, which is side splitting, but the word play and the punes (puns to you roundworlders) He was a master! He taught me how to build a character. First you need sympathy, add some empathy, then, and only then, can you flesh out the character. His sternest character was Granny Weatherwax. Ice cold and ramrod straight she was a witch's witch. Ok, so on occasion she needed to push start her broom to get it to fly, and she's bad at spelling (when sleeping she holds a placard that says "I ATE'NT DEAD") she's stern and brusk with children and men (as if there's a difference?) but you have sympathy and admiration for her. She's a marvelous character, and she realizes that when her best friend Nanny Ogg laughs at her, it's not being mean, she's being Nanny and stern old Granny comes close to melting. When I opened Terry's final novel The Shepherd's Crown the opening scene was Death coming for Granny. I closed the book and put it on the shelf and I haven't touched it since. I couldn't do it, I couldn't face the loss of Terry Pratchett AND Granny Weatherwax. If he had killed Gaspode that would have been the end of me.

Terry Pratchett was so damn funny: “Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.” and “A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.” and “It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.” I wrote an Octalogy of fan fiction titled The Enchantress Octalogy and readers told me that I captured Sir Terry's sprit, and humor. But that was Sir Terry, I want it to be ME, so I built my own universe, created my own characters, made my own magic, now I am ripping my stories out those fanfictions and making my own books which can be found here.

Sometimes my medical conditions get the best of me... sometimes I just want to lay down and fade away, but then I remember, Sir Terry Pratchett died in 2015 of early onset Alzheimer's. Even in the throes of that insidious debilitating condition, he wrote two full length novels. More than full length, I had to add shelf space for them. I think of that then get up and get back to work and that was the most valuable lesson anyone can teach a writer.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Pratchett was an absolute master of characters and humor. His wit, pithy sayings, how much depth of character and soul he could instill in such a short time, his world, and especially his dialogue, all of those were such inspirations that informed how I wrote (while King informed kind of more what I wrote, at least early on).

The Shepherd's Crown wrecked me for days. I couldn't bring myself to read it for almost two years. It hurt too much. I very rarely cry, almost never, but I wept when I finished that book.

 

[Duleigh]

Pratchett was an absolute master of characters and humor. His wit, pithy sayings, how much depth of character and soul he could instill in such a short time, his world, and especially his dialogue, all of those were such inspirations that informed how I wrote (while King informed kind of more what I wrote, at least early on).

The Shepherd's Crown wrecked me for days. I couldn't bring myself to read it for almost two years. It hurt too much. I very rarely cry, almost never, but I wept when I finished that book.

You are so right about Sir Terry. When I decided to take the main stories from my fan fiction and put them in a my own universe, I knew I'd have to say goodbye to several characters - most notably the Librarian. I'm sure he started as a joke but Sir Terry once mentioned that stories write themselves. Taking ook out of the conversation was horrible! And in my stories, the Librarian was a grandfather! (He adopted a girl that was left at the all night return and that's where my story started) The man was incredible; he could communicate so much with three letters.

Since writing my previous entry I tried again to look at the Shepherd's Crown. I still can't open it and it went back on the shelf and I calmed my nerves with a review of Lucius Beebe's Narrow Gauge in the Rockies before going back to work on Summer In SPACE. (I should have read some Asimov, but I'm past the physics and into the smutty part)

 

[ColtonWrites]

I consider Terry Pratchett to be the reason I write, and I try to emulate him in my work.
Not in his voice. I don't write comedy or satire, and I wouldn't try to compete with Sir Pterry there. But in the way that he created a universe with rules that drove the plot, and then said "okay, these are Real People who live in this universe under these rules. What would actually happen to them?"

And he never stopped prodding at the weak points of society. Not by being righteously angry about it - though you can still see the anger sometimes - but by letting the characters show you how ridiculous people are being. How ridiculous hatred and bigotry and classism and misogyny are. And how wonderfully beautifully amazing humans are.

Evil is when you start treating people as things.

Samuel Vimes' Boot Theory of Economics.

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

I have no idea what Pratchett's opinion on erotic fiction was. I do know that he would have approved of my gender choices* - Monstrous Regiment is part of my journey - and that he never stopped learning and growing as a person.

Also, knowing that he kept publishing novels for almost another decade after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease gives me a lot of hope for my own condition. I hope that everything I'm going through is treatable and temporary, and that I'll be able to go back to work as an engineer soon. But even if it isn't, I'll still be me. The things I love(d) will still be a part of me, and I will still find ways to do them.


*Gross phrasing. But you know what I mean. I can't think of the right words.

 

[ColtonWrites]

Since writing my previous entry I tried again to look at the Shepherd's Crown. I still can't open it and it went back on the shelf and I calmed my nerves with a review of Lucius Beebe's Narrow Gauge in the Rockies before going back to work on Summer In SPACE. (I should have read some Asimov, but I'm past the physics and into the smutty part)

I need to re-read it.
You might try the audiobook version, but save it for a time when you need a good cry. I found it easier to get through on audio - my brain kept trying to skip pieces when I read. I think I didn't want Granny to die too much to read it straight through.

 

[Duleigh]

I have no idea what Pratchett's opinion on erotic fiction was. I do know that he would have approved of my gender choices* - Monstrous Regiment is part of my journey - and that he never stopped learning and growing as a person.

Thank you for bringing that up! It caused me to research PTerry's past interviews, and I found exactly what we both probably knew. I found an interview from 2000 on r/discworld where he was being pressed on gay and trans issues, and his replies were all the same. "Let character be the characters" The interviewer asked if Cherry Littlebottom was a gay/trans issue and what Terry was saying was very simple, very Pratchett:

"The dwarfish issue arose originally out of the established fact that fantasy/folklore rarely deals with female dwarfs and acts as if they don't exist. Ergo, females dwarfs exist and look like male dwarfs, ergo, their society does not differentiate between the sexes once the kids are weaned, ergo this society is going to *very interesting* to write about when it comes into contact with human society. I have to admit that unfolding it, and exploring
the issues in my own mind, has been fascinating... Let's start with the fact that I would not be a good author if I sat down and said 'right, I'm going to explore the issue of [fill in issue of the moment']. This stuff evolves from the characters. It has to."

Then he was asked "Did you intend parallels from Angua's, the werewolf's situation, in "Feet of clay" to the coming out problematic of gay, lesbian and transgender persons?" I love his answer:

"I invented Angua simply because I could see the character depth available with a person who is half wolf, half human and not at home in either society. I had no other motive, but it soon became clear how the parallels were developing."

Again - let the character be the character. As for Erotic Fiction he did speak about it in Eric, where he defined boundaries:

"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Shepherd's Crown is worth reading. I read it a few years after Pratchett (and thus Granny) died - I find reading about people who Are Dead much easier to deal with than the dying. And it was a fairly minor part of the book, just significant in terms of our experience as Discworld fans as a whole. Particularly as Granny Weatherwax was probably the closest he had to an avatar in Discworld - both worked to make things right that weren't; neither was nice.

(to quote Sondheim, "Nice is different from good.")

That said, while he argued he was an angry grumpy man, he was very nice when I met him in 1993 and he signed my recently-bought paperback, when I couldn't afford the new hardback he was plugging at the time.

Start with a character, or a situation. Then think "What if?" See what happens. I did that in 2020 (my previous Lit stories were thinly-disguised truths, though I have a novel elsewhere), and next thing you know, I have about 50 stories in the Kumquatverse on Lit. It's Earth as we know it, only with scientists having slightly less sex than in reality. Just more ethics with it. And the odd time slip.

Amusingly, my average ratings have declined as I've written more here, possibly because I've tried more experiments. Some I think worked OK but several readers didn't (yes, it's possible to score 3.4 outside of Loving Wives!), some I found out while trying to progress the work that it wouldn't progress - eg subverting the trope that someone introduced to BDSM always loves it, by having them not enjoy it, can be made into an interesting story, but it's not going to be a BDSM story.

 

[ColtonWrites]

some I found out while trying to progress the work that it wouldn't progress - eg subverting the trope that someone introduced to BDSM always loves it, by having them not enjoy it, can be made into an interesting story, but it's not going to be a BDSM story.

I keep running into this with what start out as noncon tropes and end up as romances. Turns out if you take the bad guy out of the noncon...you don't have a noncon story anymore.

 

[OddLove]

This might definitely be negatively effecting my progress of writing, but I only listen to audio books unless I'm reading erotica on here.

And I only listen to sci fi audio books. The last two was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Service Model.

The pacing of adventure sci fi is so different from most erotica that it might not help my own erotica writing skills at all.

I actually find the YouTube advice channels to be the most helpful in my case.

Like "10 reasons your characters might feel flat" or "these 7 things will kill your story"

And then I just slowly add soft rules to my own writing if they apply to erotica.

Even with that being said, I still agree reading makes people better writers.

 

[ColtonWrites]

The pacing of adventure sci fi is so different from most erotica that it might not help my own erotica writing skills at all.

Depends on what you're going for. I could see a HHGG-paced spicy romance being quite fun.

 

[OddLove]

Depends on what you're going for. I could see a HHGG-paced spicy romance being quite fun.

Definitely true. I think if I were writing sci fi myself then I'd definitely be benefitting from the sci fi I consume.

I've read some sci fi on here from people who are clearly huge sci fi consumers.

Like one big difference I'll spot is when someone manages to explain a function of a technology without turning it into a text book about physics or using sci fi word salads to over complicate 'teleporter' or 'force field' lol. It's a strange art.

Providing the relevant information efficiently so that it makes some sense while keeping the delivery both digestible and artful simultaneously.

Not something I can currently pull off.