Continuing Education for Writers Part 1

After the first wave of rejection letters started coming in for Novel #1, I knew I needed to find a way to become a better author. In case you’re wondering, my formal education was pretty limited. Traditional school up until 8th grade, then haphazard homeschooling, with a final year and a half of college before it petered out. This isn’t something I’m particularly proud of but I can’t change it. Instead I knew that I needed to get an education in writing and genre in the only way I knew how- by teaching myself.


One of the biggest helps has been following the general advice of reading book in my genre published in the last two years. Me being me I didn’t leave it at that. I started reading publication announcements. Every month I would get sixteen books from the library, eight original novels and eight sequels, that had been published six months previously. What was interesting is that I never read the cover blurb- I went at these books completely cold. Okay, that’s a lie. By the last six months or so I checked Goodreads star ratings and kicked out anything that was shelved under dystopian*. Over the course of three years I read hundreds of books. In the end it was too many books a month and I ended up overloading myself, but it was valuable while it lasted.



I learned way more from doing this then I ever would have thought. First off I was reading widely for the first time. Almost all of these books were speculative YA, but there’s a huge amount of diversity under that banner. Like anyone I have a list of preferences a mile long that I use to choose a book. Without those I was reading vampire books, paranormal romance, adventure books, and others. Books I would normally steer clear of. It gave me an appreciation for these subgenres even if they aren’t my favorite thing.



The most important thing I learned what made all books the same. After reading so many varied stories I started to see the construction underneath. It was like going to the theater and watching a play from behind. I could see the where the set pieces were glued together. I could tell when a performer was early of late. I might not have had a professor to guide me, but I had an army of my peers to show me how writing a book is done.


This has allowed me to experience a significant jump in my writing skills. I can clearly see a difference in the books I wrote before I started my reading program and after. I approach my projects with the ability to think critically about them. That clarity is an excellent tool that I wouldn’t have gotten any other way and I can’t speak highly enough of it.



Well, that’s all for the first part of my whitefly education. Part two is coming soon!



*It’s not that I hate the genre, it was just that some of the tropes are problematic for me.