Reading in Your Genre, Part 1: How it Can Improve Your Writing
by Jonathan Chatfield
Like any skill, putting words to paper that are coherent, purposeful, and worth reading requires ‘doing it wrong’ many times before we start to get it right, and you’ve heard it before; to be a better writer, you need to read more.
But what if you write in the genre you enjoy reading? If you devour innumerable pages of Science Fiction — like a black hole consumes dark matter (see what I did there?) — does that mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, write Science Fiction? Does the adage ‘never get high off your own supply’ apply to us?
There is duality in nearly every human endeavor. So, it should come as no surprise that my question — should you read in the genre you write? — can be answered like Bilbo Baggins when Gandalf asks him if he’s leaving the One Ring behind. “Well, no… and yes!” Today, we’ll talk about the reasons I think it’s a good idea to do so.
First, as any avid reader of genre fiction will tell you, there are conventions. I’m not referring to the conventions you spend months putting together a costume to attend — there’s nothing wrong with this! — I’m referencing those expectations that ‘reader you’ has from the story because, for good or ill, they appear with relative frequency in genre fiction. It’s quite literally the definition…
