When I teach adults to write, which I do, one thing we talk a lot about is reading as a writer, which is different than reading to analyze, and it’s also different than reading for pleasure. So, when you read with your writer’s hat on, you might stop and notice the techniques that a writer is using to make you interested in the story or to create investment in a character.
Why do you care about this character or how does that writer make you curious to find out what will happen next or how does that writer deal with handling like oh, the backstory, the stuff that happened before, right, the stuff you need to explain? How did they get here right, who are they? There are a lot of different techniques for that, and you might read through a book and say oh, I see, this writer’s doing that.
And in this other similar story this writer did this other thing. What am I going to do? So, I very often assign my students to read books that are similar to what they want to write. They don’t always like this, but I do think it’s very useful. So, for me to go and read other people’s toy stories might be very useful because I can get ideas not for the story, the heart of the story I want to tell so much as, you know, how do they handle the — do toys eat? I don’t know.
Some toys eat. Other toys don’t eat. What’s the logic of the magic in toy stories that I admire and how is it laid out, right? Is it explained upfront at some point? Is it not explained upfront? Do we just figure it out? Is it maybe even inconsistent and is that okay, right? So, I can read with that eye. I might do that after my first draft. I might try getting out my first draft, and I encourage my students to write that first draft without worrying too much about techniques, too much about what other people have written, but then I think it’s very useful to go and read as a writer.