All you've done there is explain that people can take what they've learnt and construct imaginary things from them with their mind. I never said people couldn't do that, I said that people who write good stories simply do it better. You can't really learn how to make a compelling story out of something just because you read a lot—it's not a learnable skill. The fact is that there are some people out there who just come up with these amazing ideas, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to increase your chances in doing that, because an idea is something you get from simply living your life and doing the things you do.
...and I'm saying that learning doesn't just come from reading. Have you watched a movie lately? Have you watched television lately? Both employ writers.
While this may be superficially true, it isn't particularly relevant. Good ideas are all over the place. What reading a lot does is tell you which ones have been done to death. As someone else said, you don't want to keep reinventing the wheel. "I've invented the wheel!" you shout from the mountaintop. "Yeah, yeah, we've already got wheels," everybody on Earth answers. Is it a good idea? Sure. But it's been done. "I've invented the mousetrap!" you shout from the mountaintop. "Yeah, we have mousetraps. Have you got a better one? If so, we'll beat a path to your door," everybody on Earth answers. ("No!" you cry, knowing that the last thing you want is everyone on Earth on your doorstep.) My point is, like it or not, you're not going to have good original ideas. They almost never happen. There really aren't that many things that humans really care about, and there really aren't that many things that can happen to humans that are interesting. They've all been done already. Your originality - your literary value to the world - will be in how well you write and how effectively you shine your unique light on your subject. So, sure, nurture your unique light, but read a lot so you know how to write well. The actual ideas? If they were new, they'd be important. As it is, they really aren't.
I attended school with a surprising many students that would have rather written than read. What I noticed was that they had less concept of what would interest other people. They had trouble filtering out the needless details because they were less familiar with what kinds of stories felt too clunky to them. I also had a hard time reading and preferred to write instead. The major difference I have noticed since reading more, and more broadly, is that I have more original ideas for a story. When you don't know what is out there, you'll struggle to separate from the pack. The OP has made the comparison between fishing and watching fishing shows, saying one did not need to go with the other. Absolutely. But, reading is not the same as watching someone else write. Reading is more like wine tasting. If you are a wine connoisseur, how will you know the quality of your wine unless you have experimented with other wines? How will you know that you have not simply copied the formula of another winemaker? You don't have to read in order to learn how to write well, not really. However, you do have to become familiar with other stories if you want to be a great storyteller. Saying 'Who did the first great writer read?' is nonsensical because the first great writer innovated the art of the story in written format, but not the art of the story. For as long as humans have existed there have been stories told. The most important thing, however, is that reading keeps you humble and centered as a writer. There is always a better writer than you, no matter how great you think you are. The masterful storyteller is not jealous of this person or afraid of reading better works, because they are in love with the story. It need not be their own for them to enjoy it. Musicians never make good music by not listening to music. Athletes don't innovate new strategies without being familiar with the older ones. Scientists don't come up with earth-shattering scientific theories by being ignorant of science and its methods. Do you want to be an adequate storyteller or a great storyteller? If you want to be great then you need to observe and recognize greatness when you read other works. Which means you do need to read them.
I went through such a phase. It started at university, my brain was oversaturated by information and I had no interest in adding to my already enormous pile of material. When I started writing fiction, first three years or so, I had no interest at all in reading, I just wrote and wrote. But once I started getting control of my writing, reliably churning out reasonable quality material, I started to crave reading. It's almost a brain rest for me now, because I can't keep up the intensity of writing for too long. It's became a lot harder than it was in the beginning, when I was just feeling my way around.
Again, what's your point? The writers who have been involved with these things are the good ones. They are the ones with good ideas. They are the ones who have the ability to use their imaginations effectively, otherwise they wouldn't be making their living doing it. Well, I partly agree with you. Most things have already been done in some way or another. What makes an idea 'good' these days is how it's done. And that in itself is an idea I suppose, not just the initial larger thing, but how it's explored, how it's shown to the reader. However, I don't think reading really improves your own writing—writing does. Actually putting fingers to keys and getting it critiqued professionally, learning what you've done wrong yourself. Reading is just a form of experiencing a story, and stories can be experienced in many other ways, in this day and age at least.
My point is that if people watch a television show or a movie and get inspired by it with ideas of their own, are learning without reading... Other than Laze, will someone else tell me if I'm being that confusing with my point? Not trying to be disrespectful but I need to know if I'm coming across as a blathering idiot to everyone, or if it is just him that isn't getting my point that a person can learn and get ideas from things other than reading.
Well, that could be plagiarism to a degree. But like minstrel said, genuine inspiration is kind of impossible these days. Our imaginations are limited to our own knowledge. Besides, I'm not sure why you're trying to depict the point of inspiration coming from things other than reading, as that is exactly what I said in my first reply to this thread. However, watching a television programme and feeling inspired by it is not learning how to come up with an idea, like I said before, it's just mild plagiarism at best. I think the best stories come from life experience, things that are based on something that you alone have experienced, and adapted into something more fascinating.
It doesn't have to be plagiarism. One of my favorite ideas came from flipping through the channels and coming across a newscast. There was a report about a minister in Las Vegas that was passing out brochures in front of strip clubs and night clubs that was labeled, "God Loves Strippers." My idea sounds nothing like that news report, but it inspired me to come up with my idea. Now if you want to get down to the physiology of whether a person is going to be creative or not, Right brain/Left brain/Mid brain, that is a totally different conversation.
Well that's different; it's your interpretation of a specific person doing a specific thing. That isn't watching a fictional TV show that's been designed and refined by a writer, and basing your own idea off of it, which is what I was referring to with the plagiarism thing. In fact, what you just mentioned was exactly what I said. It was you simply being you, seeing some weird shit and getting a cool idea from it. Whether the idea you gained from seeing that man do what he did is a good idea, well, I can't really comment on that. Well, physiology isn't something I'm familiar with, so I wouldn't even know. Still, I just think you simply cannot teach yourself to have good ideas. You're just either someone who can come up with great stories, or, you are not. At least that's the way I feel how it works. But what do I know, I'm no fucking scientist or anything.
It can only be assumed then, according to some posts, that today's writing is better than yesteryear's if reading all the greats begets the next great. Is that a popular consensus, that today's writers are better?
My oh my, I've never seen so many analogies in a single thread in my entire life. It's giving me a headache. Please someone make the analogies go away.
How much editing do you do? You and Garball sound like you buy into the instant genius fallacy. That a great writer can roll out of bed and write a masterpiece. That writing isn't a craft that needs to be worked on. You guys are just born writers eh? I haven't seen any of your writing. Maybe you're awesome. What genre are you writing? I don't know how anyone could write literary fiction without first being a reader of that type of fiction. Because an important thing about literary fiction is tradition. Do you stay within a tradition? Do you break from tradition? Look at writers like Pynchon and Vonnegut. They broke from tradition. They broke away from modernism. Vonnegut and Pynchon wouldn't have made it as writers if they didn't read. I can't think of any writer that would have. Again, I haven't seen your writing. Maybe you write horror stories and thus reading isn't that important to you telling these tales. But I've never known a serious writer that wasn't interested in reading.
I'm not very good at editing my own work. Most often I catch errors in other people's work that I blatantly miss in my own. Usually after one test reader I can spot and fix most of my mistakes. As for my style, it is mostly sardonic like Vonnegut's, but with less socialistic views embedded in it. I like writing about things that I see going on behind that scenes that gives me humor. I don't think I'm that great of a writer, but I think some people get enjoyment out of it, and that's really the best goal anyone can have.
I think that's basically what I've been trying to say. It's not about copying some other writer's style or ideas. It's becoming familiar with what makes a story readable.
Ha ha! That's actually a good question, isn't it? But DO people 'of today' read as much as they did in the past? I'm not sure. And if they do, are they reading deeply, or is it just shallow skimming? From the 'how-to' books that proliferate on the market and are often promoted here on this forum, I get the idea that you have to work very hard just to grab somebody's attention and keep it for more than 5 minutes. You pile gimmick upon gimmick, get them to turn pages as fast as possible, then move them on to buy your 'next' book. I don't call that 'reading' so much as killing time by consuming words. Even children's books seem over-simplified today. My parents read fairy tales and other stories to me when I was very young, but they were fairy stories actually written by Hans Christien Anderson, the Brothers Grimm, etc ...not picture books written in dumbed-down language. (I still remember John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River as being one of my favourite stories ever.) In fact, I don't remember too many books given to me that were specifically for 'children.' The stories I loved the most were the kind that would appeal to children, but they were not written in a childish way. Books like Old Yeller, Treasure Island, David Copperfield, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (not that wretched TV series), Call of the Wild, Ivanhoe. I had read (and re-read) all of these before I started junior high school. Many of them had no pictures at all, or just a few illustrations scattered throughout. I was able to actually read for myself before I started kindergarten. It just happened. I became familiar with the stories that were read to me, and was soon able to 'read' them for myself. It's kind of what I've been driving at here. There are many ways to learn, but osmosis is painless and effective. You can absorb techniques and outlooks simply by being exposed to them often enough. And if reading is presented as pure pleasure, not something you 'ought' to do, so much the better. People enjoy having a go at JK Rowling, and perhaps her style of writing isn't everybody's cup of tea (it wasn't mine), but she did one thing that very few present-day authors have done. She got young CHILDREN reading 'big' books. And reading them because they were excited about what happened in the stories and what was going to happen next, not because reading was 'good' for them. I agree with @Garball that it's theoretically possible to 'write' without being much of a reader. I'm just not sure how many good writers fall into that category. And a question I asked him earlier has not yet been answered. Why should anyone read what HE writes? If nobody is reading anybody any more, why bother to write at all?
I think writing got way too commercialised in today's world, and that diluted the quality. I just don't see books equal in quality to the old greats. Just thinking about Jane Eyre, Dune, or any other favourite books of mine, it's hard to come across such strong voices, and such elaborate worlds today. I feel that we've taken a step back as far as quality of literature, and truly great novels are very few and far between (they still get written though). But there's a wealth of quality literature out there, some of it might be over a hundred years old, even over a thousand, but it's well worth a read.
If only the people churning out today's biggest novels learned a single flippin' thing from the greats. There are wonderful, wonderful books out there. Don't let your ego get in the way of discovering them.
Yeah, I agree. In another thread I brought up how much literature has changed since the late 1970's. In 1972 Hemingway's "Islands in the Stream" was #1. Most of the top ten prior to 1980 were literary works. Then during the 80's its all spy thrillers, crime thrillers, Tom Clancy, Roburt Ludlum etc. I posited that it could have been because people wanted to read about the same things they were seeing at the cinema. Movies around this time had already moved towards action and thrillers. Books weren't that far behind. I used the term "cinema brain" for a lack of a better word to describe how the new reader engages with reading. I think we still have all the old readers, but the rise of the cinema as a medium to tell elaborate stories changed things.
Cinema Brain. I like that. Interesting that I find TV adaptations of classics much better (usually) than movie adaptations. I think it's because they take their time. Chapters become episodes, and deal with a story in much more detail than a 2-hour jaunt to the cinema. Case in point is the wonderful Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation of Pride and Prejudice which aired in 1995. I found this much more enjoyable and closer to the spirit and content of the book than the later movie adaptation starring Kiera Knightly. The movie version just galloped by, and seemed disjointed to me. So ...is TV Brain more akin to Novel Brain than Cinema Brain? Could be?
I agree, but I think there's another factor, or rather, group of factors. In the USA, the Sixties were an amazingly transformational decade, and not just in terms of literature. But literature saw the deaths of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others of the old guard during that decade, and new voices were having a hard time getting a foothold. Look at the reasons: the Vietnam War was tearing generations apart; the civil rights movement was tearing races apart and bringing them together; the rise of rock and roll, drug culture, feminism, free love, and so on was another polarizing force. There were the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and they changed the world. Then, in the early Seventies, a criminal President was forced to resign and Americans could no longer trust their own government. A new era in American culture was beginning, and writers were looking for ways to lead it. There were a few transitional figures - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and so on, but they were associated with the drug culture and perhaps many at the time didn't take them seriously enough. The younger writers, who are nowadays regarded as America's literary stars - Pynchon, De Lillo, McCarthy, Robert Stone, etc. - hadn't yet gotten any traction. So there was no continuity in American literature. The old guys were dead and then the world changed. The young guys were struggling to find voices that fit the new world. It's no surprise that, with all the craziness going on, people started reading merely for escapism. Science fiction (Dune, for example) became far more popular. So did fantasy - Lord of the Rings really took off at that time. And, as you point out, we see the rise of the thrillers - the Clancys, the Ludlums, the Alistair MacLeans. James Bond movies. It's like America hit a huge cultural speed bump in the Sixties that didn't settle down until the late Seventies. This led to a massive discontinuity in American literature. A generation grew up seeking fantasies of perfect lives and TV (The Brady Bunch, for example) provided them. There was no fertile soil for writers to sow their seeds in. Too many earthquakes, so nobody was paying any attention. It was a tough time, I guess, to be a serious writer in America. It took a while before the public started recognizing giants in the literary landscape again, but by the time they did, the battle had been lost. Pop culture - disposable culture - had won. I haven't thought much about this - I'm making it all up as I type, after six beers and too many straight hours awake. But at this time of a Friday night, it seems to make some sense to me.
