I write fiction. That's not much of a surprise to anyone, I know. However, most people are surprised to find out that I
read fiction quite sparingly. It baffles them, and they often reply with questions like "How can a fiction writer not love reading fiction?".
It's not that I don't love a good fiction story or don't want to support other fiction writers. It's simply the fact that I love to write, I love to create, and I love to learn.
I was infected with the storyteller gene from birth, or at least a very young age. My mind was an enigma filled with people, creatures, super powers, magic, science, and wonder. I loved to tell stories, act them out with my friends, collaborate stories together, and turn our entire neighborhood into a new world of potential adventures and future episodes. We turned simple ball games into war scenes, and hikes into escapades.
When I began writing stories down as a kid, I quickly acknowledged something about them: many more fanfiction and crossover stories made it to paper than did my own personal ideas. It frustrated me that my stories were constantly based on or compared to someone else's material. I became so aggravated that for weeks I refused to write. Then one day as I was writing a required short story for school, I figured out the problem.
The reason was detail. The characters I had adopted from other creators were fully developed. They had attitudes, accents, appearances, behaviors, etc. I had read all about them in books or seen them on TV or in movies. I knew everything about them, and them made it much easier to use than the shifting, variable characters of my own childhood creation. My characters were inconsistent, and I realized that if I ever wanted to get anywhere, that needed to change.
That moment affected my writing and entertainment choices forever. I realized that I didn't want to fill my head with only the creations of others. I wanted to find out what my own creations really were and learn what to do to make them realistic. I wanted my creations, like those I had admired for years, to be believable, connectable, loveable, actual, and legitimate. And that meant it was time to study.
I had always been enthralled by two things: history and science. I love stories of fact, myth, fantasy, religion, and etymology too, but all of these are merely shoots on the tree of history. If you start at the leaves of history and work backwards, you will find yourself becoming acquainted with a great many things by the time you reach the common trunk and explore the origin of the roots. There's so much to learn in and about the past. Things that will blow your mind and leave you in awe.
That's my "nerdy" side; I love to learn. I just do. I'm a victim of the adage: knowledge is more addictive than drugs. And I love to transfer that into my writing. I love to study things from all sorts of venues so that I can build realistic places and people for my readers. I want my science fiction to be more science than fiction. I want cultures to be developed and complex, like real cultures are.
So, when I choose something to read I often choose things that will help me accomplish my goals and satisfy my passions. This tends to be more nonfiction than anything, and I've come to enjoy it very much. I certainly like reading fiction and reserve time for doing so; but I enjoy writing fiction more than reading it, and to do that well, I must have knowledge from which I can build.
Of course, that doesn't mean I'm the type who will sit and
watch a documentary. But movies, music, and TV are a subject for another post.
Do you think I'm crazy? Are you the same? What things affect the genres that you pick up? Take a minute and comment below. And if you've got a good book you've just finished reading--from any genre--don't hesitate to recommend it in your comment. My list is always growing.
