Daring to read widely

I was intrigued and a little amused to read a comment by Keren David, buried in her post about books that inspired her: ‘I had hardly read a contemporary YA book before I started to write one.’

Well! At this point I feel we should BURN THE WITCH! You are not supposed to say things like that, except in the course of admitting how terribly you went wrong, and explaining why you have not yet been published and never will be, or at least won’t be pending your repentant completion of the Ten Tick Boxes of How to Do It.

On the other hand, given the well-deserved success of Keren’s Joe/Ty novels, that reaction doesn’t seem to be called for. In fact, those of us who haven’t managed to read every book published in our field for the last 10 years might breathe a sigh of relief. Being an evil editor I probably feel even more pressured to know the market than an author does, and not just in one field of children’s books but everything from bath books to paranormal romance. Can’t do it, though.

I might be able to access sales figures more easily and get a better inside track on what’s coming, and as I’m about to take on responsibility for Rainbow Magic I’m taking a crash course on one very particular market niche, but my average haul after a visit to the library tends to look like this: one YA novel, one MG novel, one popular science book, one literary novel, one sci fi/fantasy novel, one popular history book, one book in Russian that I will end up having to return before I’ve slogged through more than two chapters. Every few months or so, I get a batch of 12 picture books.

This is not going to make me a leading expert in anything. But it keeps my brain fed more than an exclusive diet of what you might call professionally useful input would, and it fits with my gut feeling that reading quality writing from diverse fields is more likely to hone my expertise than reading everything of every standard in one field. I suppose it’s much the same as someone who works in architecture looking through the trade journals at work then going home and reading novels for pleasure. It’s just that, in publishing, you can never read all the trade texts.

So while it’s probably not ideal for most authors to have no experience in the field they want to write in (Keren has a history as a journalist, so she was at least highly-trained in a related field), and an editor certainly couldn’t work on that basis, Keren’s story is a useful reminder that even in these days of BookScan obsession, sometimes mere talent can do the job – at least in the field of author-led fiction, and that is where most authors want to be.