Listening to an audio book (read by a good narrator) is also study. Hearing the words aloud adds to your feeling for cadence and rhythm--in narrative as well as dialogue.
Hard to disagree with this. I taught creative writing for 35 years, and most of my students didn't like to read much, often fearing that they would be "infected" by another writer's ideas or style. I would point out historical precedents, where a writer was deliberately rewriting an earlier novel written by someone he or she admired. I published with a number of small presses and a few books with one big house. I published realistic fiction and fantasy fiction and postmodern surrealistic prose poetry. I even published YA and middle grade novels and was considered a "boy" author. I've had some success and awards and fellowships and so on, except for maybe my best light horror novel, called The Night Before Krampus, about the St. Nicholas's alter ego. Big publishers didn't know what to do with it, so I published it through my agency and Amazon, making it clear that, although a completely different story, the book was a homage to Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I would provide my students with a long excerpt in a PDF, with a link to the book itself. https://works.bepress.com/peter-johnson-PC/10/ That seemed to work for them, but the whole experience of publishing that book proved to me, stunningly, how little EDITORS themselves read, which of course means that they all had a small frame of reference from which to judge manuscripts, and thus were more interested in trends than anything else..
Listening to an audio book (read by a good narrator) is also study. Hearing the words aloud adds to your feeling for cadence and rhythm--in narrative as well as dialogue.
Yes, good point! I've been diving into audiobooks and radio dramas on YouTube. It's a great education. Thanks, K.C.
Nothing replaces reading. Learned just as much from Bradbury and Matheson as Hemingway and Cervantes. Read, and ready widely.
Well said, my friend.
Hard to disagree with this. I taught creative writing for 35 years, and most of my students didn't like to read much, often fearing that they would be "infected" by another writer's ideas or style. I would point out historical precedents, where a writer was deliberately rewriting an earlier novel written by someone he or she admired. I published with a number of small presses and a few books with one big house. I published realistic fiction and fantasy fiction and postmodern surrealistic prose poetry. I even published YA and middle grade novels and was considered a "boy" author. I've had some success and awards and fellowships and so on, except for maybe my best light horror novel, called The Night Before Krampus, about the St. Nicholas's alter ego. Big publishers didn't know what to do with it, so I published it through my agency and Amazon, making it clear that, although a completely different story, the book was a homage to Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I would provide my students with a long excerpt in a PDF, with a link to the book itself. https://works.bepress.com/peter-johnson-PC/10/ That seemed to work for them, but the whole experience of publishing that book proved to me, stunningly, how little EDITORS themselves read, which of course means that they all had a small frame of reference from which to judge manuscripts, and thus were more interested in trends than anything else..