Well how about that, I’m three blog posts for three weeks. I’ve struggled with writing these too often, primarily because my time is much better spent writing books as opposed to writing blog posts that nobody is reading (at least not yet.) But I’ve found it helps get the gears moving and I can transition easier into writing a book when I’ve taken a few minutes dumping my thoughts onto here.

I’m often teased by my friends for reading a lot of “crap” novels. I don’t discuss those titles on here, because I don’t want to be one of those people that slags off other peoples work just because they can do it on a platform of quasi-anonynmity. There’s more to it than that of course but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I do have a method to my madness though. Something I’ve come to understand better about myself is that I tend to learn best when watching somebody do something. I think officially psychology says that everybody learns from doing, then from there everybody learns things through visual, aural, or verbal through varying degrees of effectiveness–but don’t quote me on that.

For me though, I definitely learn better by watching. So in terms of writing, reading is how I accomplish learning visually. Naturally the best way to learn something visually is to watch somebody that’s better than you work, but I think far too often we discount what we can learn from watching somebody less skilled.

Skill is difficult to judge in writing and to be clear, I don’t go about comparing myself to other authors when I read these “poor” novels. Instead my focus is on locating aspects of these novels that don’t work and picking them apart to understand why. My friend Rob thinks this is crazy, he’ll say, “Look, I already know that making the whole story just a dream doesn’t work, I don’t need to read a novel that does that to learn why!” I get that reasoning, but I disagree. Tropes, even the terrible ones like, “it was all a dream” are tools that are meant to be used and molded to achieve a satisfying story. I don’t know of a story out there where the “it was all a dream” ending worked, but someday one will be written and it will be by somebody who studied that concept and made it work in their favor.

One last word on this–the other reason I don’t talk about the “bad” novels I read here is because in a certain sense there really is no such thing as a “bad” novel. From an objective standpoint, sure, there are some real crap books out there. I remember reading one while working the a publishing company that was 85k words long and every single one of them was wrong. I mean, really, it was probably just about the worse thing I’ve ever read. But somebody, somewhere sat down and they dedicated hours, hundreds of them to writing their book. Maybe the end product wasn’t great, but that practice just means the next one will be better. I can’t think of anything worse than calling somebody out for writing something terrible, making them feel like their work was a waste of time, then having them give up on the craft. Our first work is always terrible. Anybody who puts in the work could write a masterpiece, so anybody who has the desire should be encouraged to do the work.