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.

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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.

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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.

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,

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.)

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.

(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]

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.

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