Tip for May 3, 2010; Reading and Writing

I was reading Donita K. Paul's writing blog yesterday, and read this short post, titled, "Best Writing Advice Ever" It read,

"Read what you want to write and write what you want to read."

That's all. And very good advice at that. I'm going to take this sentence and turn it into a blog post, using what my dad calls the 'engineer' approach.

"Read what you want to write." It means to read the genre or sub-genre that you write in. To do away with big words, it means that if I want to write in Christian Fantasy, I should probably read Christian Fantasy.

"Write what you want to read." Basically, when you would write a book, write something that would be something that you would want to read. Easy.

But now I venture to add a phrase to this venerable tip; "You will write in what you read." What does that mean? Take the engineer approach.

This phrase isn't that different from it's predecessors, except for one word; 'will'. Future tense. So, if you don't write, this applies to you. If you read a certain genre, you may eventually write in that genre. So take care what you read, and that applies to everyone. You read scrap material, you'll write scrap. That's it. The same goes for the opposite; you read quality stuff, you'll write quality stuff.

Signing out,