Hatrack River Writers Workshop   
my profile login | search | faq | forum home

  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» Hatrack River Writers Workshop » Forums » Open Discussions About Writing » Reading to Write

   
Author Topic: Reading to Write
lehollis
Member
Member # 2883

 - posted      Profile for lehollis   Email lehollis         Edit/Delete Post 
I hope this is okay to ask here. I apologize if not.

In another thread, Antimony said, "To be a good fiction writer one must read good fiction writers. Often."

I agree, but I have a problem. (For one, I think I'm blind to good writing, but putting that aside.) With as little time as I have, it's hard to pick writers at random and hope they're good. I've read good older authors, but not recent ones.

Does anyone know where I can find a list of a few good modern writers to help me hone my writing?


Posts: 696 | Registered: Sep 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
Administrator
Member # 59

 - posted      Profile for Kathleen Dalton Woodbury   Email Kathleen Dalton Woodbury         Edit/Delete Post 
I'd recommend Thomas Perry for strong beginnings and interesting characters, and clever plots.

Also, I love the way Tony Hillerman opens with description (and I do not usually like description).


Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
InarticulateBabbler
Member
Member # 4849

 - posted      Profile for InarticulateBabbler   Email InarticulateBabbler         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:

With as little time as I have, it's hard to pick writers at random and hope they're good. I've read good older authors, but not recent ones.

That is really a matter of opinion. There was a thread on authors that influenced us here:
http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum1/HTML/003758.html


Posts: 3687 | Registered: Jan 2007  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
mommiller
Member
Member # 3285

 - posted      Profile for mommiller   Email mommiller         Edit/Delete Post 
You can also start with anthologies, such as "The World's Best In Sci-Fi and Fantasy," or, of course, any of the, "Writer's of the Future," volumes.

F and SF Mag, as well as Realms of Fantasy always have book reviews of the new an notable.

Check out the Hugo award winners, there's bound to be an author of your taste there.

The important thing to do is read though, and read carefully. Sometimes I will re-read a chapter just to see how it opens, how the characters are dealt with, how the plot moves forward, etc.

Good luck.

Currently I am reading, "Powers of Detection, Stories of Mystery and Fantasy," edited by Dana Stabenow, and am enjoying it.

Other editors of note would be Mike Resnick, and Ellen Datlow.


Posts: 306 | Registered: Mar 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
SharonID
Member
Member # 5059

 - posted      Profile for SharonID   Email SharonID         Edit/Delete Post 
lehollis, what genre(s) do you want to write? I could make better recommendations if I knew, and I haven't been around nearly long enough (all the more so because I am name-challenged) to know all about who aspires to what in this community.

My time for reading is also very limited (basically I've got with two meals of my three and ten minutes or so in bed every day—heh heh... nothing like reading in bad light to make one's eyes grow heavy enough to stay shut for awhile... though I am fanatical about good lighting the rest of the time!). The rest of the time I am either writing, doing writing-related things, or 'homemaking', pretty much non-stop. I've been trying to consciously read more recent fiction than I used to, though I'll admit that my personal tastes are still on the old-fashioned side. The concept of 'relaxing' with a good book seems to be a thing of the past amongst modern publishers/authors. I find a lot of the modern fiction to be much too conflict-laden and fast-paced, without nearly enough character/culture/setting development or the 'slice of life' bits I love (Diana Gabaldon manages to pull off some nice ones in her Outlander series, but she managed to break a lot of rules on the road to success) to have break up the action. Most of the really modern stuff, I find much more tiring to read, but if I want to sell, my own writing has to move at least somewhat in that direction, so read them I do. They're good stories, too, a lot of them, but they are so much more exhausting to read that I still alternate them with studies of old favorites (or older things I haven't read yet).

Anyway, if you want to sell, it would probably be enormously helpful to take some looks at what is selling these days. Let me know what you like (both to read and to write) and I can probably suggest at least a few.

Regards,

SharonID


Posts: 34 | Registered: Feb 2007  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
lehollis
Member
Member # 2883

 - posted      Profile for lehollis   Email lehollis         Edit/Delete Post 
Thank you, SharonID. That is an important detail, which I forgot to include.

Generally, I lean more towards fantasy, though I don't mind Science Fiction writing. Most of my ideas tend to be Fantasy. I might actually like to read a little more Sci-Fi to get the hang of it, in fact.

At the heart of it, I'm not above writing anything since I think I'm still finding my voice and style. If writing a romance novella helps me find that voice, then so be it. I hope it never comes to that. I'm not a fan of Romance. However, currently, I'm looking for modern sci-fi or fantasy authors who are generally considered "good". (By writers, not necessarily readers.)

Thanks for the ideas, everyone else. I've written them all down and started a list, which I will first to take to my public library and then to Amazon.

EDIT: Oh... and I think I will be in the same boat with you, SharronID. I'll try. (I'm not convinced I want to write to sell, just yet. I think I write because I enjoy it. Selling would just be icing. Yet, I DO like icing. So... in a sense, I write to sell, too.)

[This message has been edited by lehollis (edited April 03, 2007).]


Posts: 696 | Registered: Sep 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Dubshack
Member
Member # 5262

 - posted      Profile for Dubshack   Email Dubshack         Edit/Delete Post 
As a kid I read the classics, Jules Verne and HG Welles and Poe and Lovecraft... But I will admit, I especially loved the Hardy Boys novels. I swear I've read all of them before 1992...

Starting in 2005 I started reading a lot of self help books on writing, I read OSC's two books which I recommend to anyone writing Scifi...

After I'd all ready written half my current novel, my therapist recommended I pick up a book and start reading as a form of anti-depressant. I picked up "Lost Echoes" by Joe Lansdale, and was just blown away. He's got a form of prose that I've just never seen before. And its a good book to boot too, so I definately recommend that one. Then I read Enders Game by OSC, which I had a problem with the ending, but otherwise enjoyed it. My last book was American Gods by Neil Gaimon. I dunno if I'd recommend that one. The chapters are too long and the characters are a bit too cardboard for my taste.

Basically I'm working my way across the Hugo Awards list. I picked up Spin, but regretted it. I absolutely despise fiction written in the first person. I've also got Hominids by Robert Sawyer, but I'm hesitant to read it because I've got an unusual phobia of Canadian writers. And I picked up Speaker for the Dead, because well, what the hell...

Personally, I don't believe that to be a good writer you have to read good writers. I'm sure Richard Hatch (who played Apollo on the original Battlestar Galactica, wrote the whole "Second Coming" series) picked up a Steven King novel a time or two, but his novels are horrible. His writing just plain stinks.

Rather, I'm going to issue a slightly more abrasive statement. To be a DAMN good writer, you should be able to read generally accepted good writers, and identify where they went wrong and why.


Posts: 26 | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
CoriSCapnSkip
Member
Member # 3228

 - posted      Profile for CoriSCapnSkip           Edit/Delete Post 
I amassed lists of every bestseller from 1895-present, also lists of prizewinners such as Pulitzer Prize. If you write in a genre, also learn what the prizes are for that and get those lists. Good luck getting the time to select and read books! I must admit I can take only just so much of a lot of bestsellers.
Posts: 283 | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Robert Nowall
Member
Member # 2764

 - posted      Profile for Robert Nowall   Email Robert Nowall         Edit/Delete Post 
Good luck in finding those books...there are some books I've wanted to read, some for thirty years or more, that I've never laid eyes on a copy of. I suppose Amazon-dot-com or eBay or some book searching service could locate all these titles for me (or you)---but at a premium price. Reprints nowadays are few and far between, with only a few books probing new territory or adding material to books I've already picked up long ago.

(Only one of the recent Heinlein reprints I've seen puts anything in the books beyond the text itself---and these books are as important to SF as, say, Joseph Conrad or Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway are to mainstream literature.)

((Yet on the downside of that are recent Robert E. Howard reprints---pompous commentary about how good Howard was and how bad the people who kept his work in print were for doing the things they did to keep it in print. Nobody---nobody--- would remember Howard or Conan today if it hadn't been for what was done, and it's high time certain people remember that.))

(((But I digress...)))

Of course, study what you do read. If you're serious about writing, you've got to be serious about reading, too. I've learned a lot, just by picking out details of this and that.

[edited for typographical problems]

[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited April 04, 2007).]


Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
JasonVaughn
Member
Member # 4358

 - posted      Profile for JasonVaughn   Email JasonVaughn         Edit/Delete Post 
For good modern fantasy I'd read David Gemmell. I've read about half of his books and they're all really good. I especially like the fact that most of his characters lean towards the anti-hero side with lots of internal conflict going on. I think he was one of the few authors who really knew people and the way they think.
Posts: 61 | Registered: Nov 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
rstegman
Member
Member # 3233

 - posted      Profile for rstegman   Email rstegman         Edit/Delete Post 
In my early years of really heavy reading, fantasy was in hard bound, science fiction was in paper backs.
I went to the paper backs and checked out a bunch of books, and read all of them, then got more books and read them, and kept doing this until I read just about every book in the rack.

I waited a couple years and did it again.

I was not a writer back then, but I did find several authors who's books I kept running across and fell in love with. If I had been a writer, I might have wrote down the names of the authors and the publishers, but I did not.
I did find there were a lot of books I liked, so that is what I am writing.

Doing this, you find out who is a good writer and who was not. or at least, who's writing you like and who you don't.

If I were noting the publishers, I would know who I could approach with my writing when I ever get anything publishable


Posts: 1008 | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
InarticulateBabbler
Member
Member # 4849

 - posted      Profile for InarticulateBabbler   Email InarticulateBabbler         Edit/Delete Post 
Gemmell was one of my favorite authors, JasonVaughn. I've read all of his books. I'm waiting on part two of the Troy books to come out. It's too bad that his wife has to complete the last book in the series. But, at least he wrote two-thirds of it before he died.

Kevin J. Anderson is one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors.

I think that I've got a list too long to type here.


Posts: 3687 | Registered: Jan 2007  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
   

   Close Topic   Feature Topic   Move Topic   Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
 - Printer-friendly view of this topic
Hop To:


Contact Us | Hatrack River Home Page

Copyright © 2008 Hatrack River Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.


Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classic™ 6.7.2