Quote of the week:
There's a quote I came across twice this week, and there's an old saying about when you hear something in stereo, you'd better listen. Author Leigh Bardugo and David Vandagriff over at the Passive Voice Blog both referenced an article by Tobias Bucknell, where he said:
Author C.C. Finlay has a quote he uses that runs something like: “A novel doesn’t excite readers because you took all the bad stuff out of it, it excites them because of all the good stuff that’s in it, regardless of the bad.”
At a workshop not too many years ago a newer writer began to condemn a best selling novel, pointing out all its flaws and jagged edges. I listened for a long time, nodding.
“All those things are true,” I said. And gave him the C.C. Finlay quote. “But until you learn what the good parts were that excited the reader, you’re always going to be bitterly upset about what is wrong with that bestseller. Learn to spot what worked in that book, and you’ll be able to move forward. And you’ll be a lot less upset all the time as well.”
More thoughts on reading:
Author Kami Garcia shared an inspirational graphic, which I loved:
Author Steven King, in his wonderful book On Writing, has a similar quote:
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
He has another one also, which is one of my favorite writing quotes of all time:
"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
Which goes along with another great quote of his:
“I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.”
It's mind boggling when you think that a lot of us, writers I mean, think we don't have time to read. We can feel guilty because reading feels like pleasure and not work. We stop giving ourselves permission to read for fun.
Literary agent Joanna Volpe wrote about "readers block" on the wonderful PubCrawl blog this week about reading manuscripts with a view to what they could become, in which she mentioned that Stephen King writes four hours a day and reads four hours a day. And no one can call him lazy. So there you go. Read. Go ahead. You have permission. :)
What have you read this week (books, blog posts, articles, thoughts, whatever) that struck a chord with you?
Happy reading (and writing),
Martina
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