Write to Read

Hi there, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count!

It’s the final week of our series! How in the world did that happen? Again. So soon! Sometimes I wonder if I should do longer series’ just so I’ll have more time to flesh everything out before we reach the end, but then, I like having a single series last as long as a month. Means I get to start fresh in more ways than one, the beginning of every month.

The month of September, we’ve been talking about the things readers are looking for in the books they read, and how we can use this information to better the writing we do on a daily basis. I’m in no way suggesting that we should write to market, that we should use reader trends to determine what we’ll be writing next, but I do believe there are always ways for us to learn, always things we could be doing better—and that a lot of times, readers are better able to teach those things to us than other writers are.

So, without further delay…

#7: Events That Make You Dream

Readers often read books in order to gain something, to feel something beyond what they feel on a general, day-to-day basis. They’re looking to get out of their own lives, to dream of a different life entirely.

That’s something we can give them, through the art of our craft.

We can give them a dream of a life unlike any they’ve before imagined.

But how do we do it, in a way readers enjoy, one they crave? Well, that’s one of the simplest things in the world—and also one of the trickiest to master.

We must enter that same dream, and live it for ourselves.

So many times, writers write stories just to get them out of our heads, just to have something to do, something to say. We write because it’s who and what we are, but during that process we forget what it’s like to be a reader, entering a story for the first time. We forget what it’s like to dream, to live as our characters live, in a life very unlike our own.

We have to dream ourselves, in order to write a dream into our stories. If we’re not dreaming, then our readers will struggle to enter the dream.

But… that still hasn’t answered the question, has it? How do we do that, how do we make sure we’re dreaming right alongside our characters?

Again, the answer is simple, and not easy in the slightest.

Let go.

It’s one of the reasons why I don’t outline, when I write a novel. If I outline, I have too much of an idea where the story is going, what’s going to happen, and I can’t bring myself to finish it. I’ve lost the spark, the dream. Yeah, I’ll have probably made a few plotholes by the time I'm done, but I can fix those when I go back to edit.

Let go of being a writer, while you’re writing. Focus on being a reader, on entering the experience of your story. Don’t write just to write. Write to read.

That’s all there is to it—and though it sounds easy, I know from personal experience that it’s one of the most difficult things to do.

[love]

{Rani Divine}