Hey everyone! Here I am with the last post in this series for this month. I hope you all are as excited for the end of a new series as I am. This post is on time as promised and I’m excited to introduce the last tool for writers to use to improve their writing. Stick around till the end of the post to find out the topic of the next series! Without further ado….
Writer Resources and Tools: Reading New Genres
This is a tool that I think is really important for all writers to utilize but it’s also my favorite because it gives me an excuse to read a book and tell others that I’m working on improving my writing. Haha.
But in all seriousness reading new genres really can help you improve your writing and your writing style. There are just a few reasons why this is and I’ll explain each of them here.
1. Style Boosts
All different forms of genre use different forms of writing to convey different things. Reading a wide variety of genres can make you aware of these differences in style. For example, if you were reading a high fantasy novel you would notice that the writer uses more descriptive and eloquent writing styles. Why? Because novels written in the high fantasy genre generally have a new unique world with new unique species and locations which require more in-depth description and explanation from the writer to the reader and so the writing style is generally more descriptive to accommodate this genre specific type.
Romance novels are generally written from two separate perspectives. Why? So that you can understand the story from the two characters who are supposed to romantically involved in the story whether they get together at the end, the middle, or the beginning.
Contemporary Young Adult Fiction is generally written with less description and more dialogue and the description that is included is the necessary setting descriptions and are usually written in a brash eye-catching writing style and sentence structure. Why? Because the people of today who read Contemporary YA the most are living in a society where getting what you want quickly or immediately are cultural. So, the writing style of these books for the masses are written in a compliant style.
If you read books in these different genres you might be able to pick up on writing styles that you might not have been aware of before. For example if you read both High Fantasy and Romance novels you might be able to make the connection to having a book with both the description style of high fantasy but the double or multiple character style of a romance novel.
2. Writing Quirks
Every writer has their writing quirks. A writing quirk is what makes their writing recognizable by a wide variety of readers. For example, Garth Nix is well known for his novels that are written for a junior fiction audience with more young adult novel themes. Most of his books that I’ve read or heard about are written in this style no matter the topic.
Brandon Sanderson is known for having a whole unique world building done for every single series he’s ever written. Every single world has a complete developed world and you can sometimes find appendixes at the end of his books where he writes notes about the world building like it’s a textbook.
Sarah M Eden is known for her interconnected romance series’. Every single one of her books in each series is connected to all the other books in that particular series and two of her series are even connected in a single book between the two that is later referenced again in a separate book.
Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) is known in the Series of Unfortunate Events Series for writing a series that is written in a almost biographical style where his narrator (himself) is written into the story as a character with first person references to himself during the narration of the story of the other characters.
Learning about different writing quirks can help to give you an idea of a type of writing quirk that you would like to adopt for your novels. But don’t worry if you still haven’t figured out what writing quirk you want to have. Sometimes you don’t realize you have a writing quirk until people who read your writing point it out to you.
There are many more things that I could write about that are writing advantages you can gain from reading new genres but these are the two that I think are the most unique. A lot of different things about writing you can learn form books but I feel like these two things you can’t really learn from any sort of writing textbook. It’s something you really kind of have to learn on your own through studying other genres that are different from what your writing. And who knows, maybe you’ll find that you like those other genres too. Even if you don’t write them.
That’s all for this weeks post. I hope that it was helpful. The next series, like I mentioned last week, will be moving to Saturday updates because those are more convenient for me these days. I’m not sure when I’ll begin updating the next series. It’s going to really take some time to develop. But I hope you all will stick around. If you can’t wait to hear about updates with my writing, feel free to follow me on Facebook or Instagram where I try to post social updates about this blog and what’s going on with it. Thanks for sticking around. And now, to announce the next series………
The Ten Commandments of Writing
I hope that this next series is helpful as well as enjoyable and remember…
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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