The question gets brought up in writing circles a lot. Do you need to read a lot of books to write a book? Is it really necessary? Really?
The standard answer is yes! You need to have a good understanding of the thing you are making in order to do a good job making it. At the very least, you need to be able to read a book in general because you’re going to need to read your own books over and over again in the editing process.
But there’s a few longer answers to this. First, if you’re not really planning to put it out there or publish it, then you can probably get away without reading much. If no one ever sees it, then you don’t really need to know the things that reading books would teach you.
Another thing to consider are people who generally have reading difficulties. If you’re dyslexic or have focus issues or any number of other things, books can be very difficult. So let’s look at some alternatives and what they can teach if books are difficult!
Scripted dramatic television
Books are becoming more cinematic these days, so watching stuff is going to help a lot.
Shows designed on a season by season basis, such as several Netflix shows, can teach a lot about how to structure plots to maintain reader engagement. Individual episodes can help to show how to end chapters in a way that will entice people to check out the rise and reveal smaller bits of information that lead people to what the season is building up to.
You can also look at how character development works throughout a season. I find in television it’s a lot easier to tell what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to how characters grow and change throughout a season, what feels like it came out of nowhere and what feels like it’s been built up over the course of the narrative.
Just don’t put too much weight on comedies. Jokes that work on television don’t work as well without elements like timing and subtle visuals. Likewise, a character in a comedy is less likely to show progression over the course of a season. This is not always the case, but it is often the case.
Poetry
If you want your language to really sing, poetry is a great place to take inspiration from. Poetry isn’t as constrained by the structure of narrative and poems have a very different way of expressing what they are trying to get across. It’s a lot more about that feeling they want to convey, and being able to get the mood and feeling of a work across is going to come in handy when writing a book.
They won’t typically teach you as much about narrative structure or anything like that, but there’s a lot of lessons about language that can make your writing better.
Audio books
If you can’t deal with reading books, why not listen to them! An audio book will get you most of the way there to reading a book. You’ll be able to see what the language and pacing of the book is like and how an author balances description, internal monologue, and action. You’ll get a sense of how the plotting and pacing for the novel medium works.
I’m not a big audiobook person myself,1 so I can’t tell you where the pitfalls of them are, but I can’t really think of much. Maybe that you’re listening to a specific interpretation and you lose that ability to see how your imagination differs from what the final product looks like? I honestly can’t tell you.
Overall, though, there’s plenty of alternatives to novels if you want to learn the craft. There’s a lot of people out there who will say you have to read a lot, but so long as you are doing things to understand how the story works, you can probably work around the actual novels for most of it.
Although if you are asking because you just don’t like novels… maybe try a different mediums. There’s more ways to tell a story than writing a novel.
- I have audio processing issues and can’t listen and pay attention to something that long [↩]