Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from reading nonfiction

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This month, we’ve been talking about inspiration. We’ve been looking at all the inspiration we writers get from the world around us, from popular culture and weird music, from nature and from architecture, from our friends and from our enemies—and this week, we’re discussing one of the simplest of ways for a writer to find inspiration. From reading.

Tuesday, if you’ll recall, we talked fiction. We discussed writers reading fiction for the sake of finding ideas, and why it’s important for us to never stop doing that. Today, let’s look at things from the other side.

Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from reading nonfiction

If you know me at all, then you know I’m not a nonfiction writer (unless you count the blog). I’m not much of a nonfiction reader either, if I’m being honest, but I’ll be the first to tell you that it plays an incredibly important role in the lives of us fiction writers. I’ll even be the first to tell you that I have a giant stack of nonfiction books exactly for this purpose.

Why? Because, just like fiction books are read for the sake of finding ideas, nonfiction books are read in order to find an answer. And those answers are some of the most important things for us to know, as we delve deep into our writing careers.

See, information is partly the basis behind writing. It’s all information, really. We’re telling a story, we’re making a world, and we’re relaying the story through information about it. We’re showing it through the actions of the characters and the appearance of the world in which they exist—but it’s so much harder to do any of that if we don’t have a basis of nonfiction reading to back us up along the way.

How so?

I’ll use my Earth-Space series as an example. It’s a series of four books (so far), set primarily in space. It partially takes place in our solar system, yes, but it also takes part in one of the Gliese systems, around a planet you’ll just have to wait to find out the name of. What all this meant is that I needed to find out as much as I could about outer space, and the properties of the void. I needed to know how to write about a place like that, because it’s obviously not a place I’ve ever traveled, myself. It’s not really a place where I want to go, personally. It’s beautiful, sure, but there’s enough for me to see down here.

In any case, it meant that I bought all the space books off the bargain book shelves at Barnes & Noble, and I spent hour after hour reading through those books, taking note of the things that might come into play in my story, of the things I might need to know along the way.

And sure, you can use the internet for al lot of this stuff anymore, but there’s really nothing like having a book in your hands, in which you can find the information. Besides, I find it’s best to do some work that’s not on a screen, if for the sake of my eyes alone. Better for the ol’ noggin, you know.

Nonfiction, just like fiction, will always be something we writers need to have a trove of as well. We need to know how the world works, so we can make sure our stories exist properly within it. We need to know the things our characters know, if only so we don’t make our characters look like idiots, accidentally. And the only way to do these things is if we learn, through the power of the one and only nonfiction.

Honestly though, I highly recommend checking out that bargain books section, if you’re looking for some good reference books. I almost always walk away with at least one nonfiction book I’ll need for the road ahead.

Next week, our series finale! And, potentially, my favorite two topics of the week. You’ll just have to wait and see what they are :)

[love]

{Rani Divine}