"Somewhere between Jesus and Huey P. Newton," The Flobots, The Rhythm SectionI had two great goals in coming down to New Zealand. Well, scratch that, I had many great goals when coming down to New Zealand, but two of them were to read more and write more. Unfortunately, the first very quickly got in the way of the second. I made the mistake of continuing George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire straight off when I got down here, only to realize that it quickly became very difficult to write in my own voice when I was exposing myself to his for two or three hours every day.
I suppose this was a rather predictable predicament, but it didn't make it any easier on me. I had to shelf my writing for a few days while I finished up the book, which was extraordinarily frustrating to me. That said, now that I have finished it, I was able to come back to my writing feeling very refreshed, and reminded of a few things that Martin's writing has taught me in the past about structure and world-building. So cheers to that.
You, out there in internet-land--do you also have trouble sticking to your own voice when reading an author with a very strong voice of their own? Do you even bother reading at all while you're engaged in a longer project? Tell me. I want to learn.
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3 comments:
This is somewhat off the topic of your post, but if you aren't aware of it, you might want to check out National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) - it seems like it could be a cool thing to try, if not this year, another year. If I wasn't so busy with school, I'd probably think about giving it a go myself...
If I weren't already engaged in writing a novel, I definitely would. It sounds like fun, at any rate, and my friend/workshop mate Ben has done it once before and is attempting it again this year. Should be fun to watch him struggle. ;-)
If I'm in the midst of writing something I find that I need to read writing of the same style and voice to keep me focused. Right now I'm doing a lot of casual, narrative non-fiction writing. My book club read 1984 last month and I couldn't read it because it was getting in the way of my writing. Now I'm reading The Red Leather Diary which is of the same genre but not of the style I'm writing in now. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.
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