Things I can’t learn by reading

Now that my schedule is back to normal levels of busy (not sick, not writing a ton of nonfiction), I have the chance to read professionally again. By which I mean reading magazines I want to submit to, collections of Year’s Best short stories, novels by highly regarded genre authors. Starting up again after so long made me conscious there are some ways reading professionally helps me, and some it won’t. The most obvious way is that it shows me what particular markets are buying. Most magazines have a What We Like page on their Web site but it helps a lot to see how that works in practice. Also, seeing what better authors are writing gives me a wider concept of what I could be doing. Sometimes this translates into a specific story solution: One of my old stories, Jack Be Nimble, for example, never took off until I read a similar twisted fairy tale set in the modern day; translating Jack from a fairy tale land to the present made everything click. More often, it’s just a sense of potential: Of the range of things that can be done, the ideas that can be put into play, the edge-of-genre material that can still sell. What it can’t do, however, is show me how to duplicate what someone else does. I don’t mean imitate as much as capture some of the same flavor: A writer’s ability to sharply define character, to sketch out an action scene, to build suspense, to use language. I can recognize these things, but I can’t usually translate them to my work (at least not consciously) if they’re not something I’m already doing. This may be partly because I can’t sit down and microstudy when I read. Some writers recommend taking a half-dozen issues of any magazine you want to write for and breaking down each story: Happy or sad? Male or female protagonist? What sub-genre? Any flashbacks? Or doing the same for novels from a particular publisher. This is the kind of tedious detail work that my mind rebels against, and (as Churchill once said) up with which it will not put. It may be that some things just don’t analyze well. Looking at a huge, epic, three-volume fantasy, I might be able to analyze the plot structure but it wouldn’t tell me how to put a plot together. I can enjoy the pulse-pounding melodrama Stan Lee and Jack Kirby injected into their best books, but I can’t see how to duplicate it (a pity—the sense that the fate of the world hinges on every adventure certainly wouldn’t hurt some of my novels). And countless writers have struggled and failed to duplicate the distinctive stylings of Lord Dunsany or H.P. Lovecraft. On the other hand, knowing that it can be done, thinking about it … perhaps that does help at some level. Being aware of possibilities certainly can’t hurt. And it’s not like reading, even for work, is ever that much of a burden. OK, except when the highly-praised novel I’m reading bores me silly.