What I do...Piece Of Advice - Read

What I do to get ideas, writing styles etc. is read. Read and write, it works. I have read around eight fiction books and am reading my nineth. It works and after producing my second fanfic I feel quite proud of the second - the first wasn't very good. If you need help, have anything you want add to this or just want to read then this is the place for you.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but the simple answer is, "Well, yeah."

As in, you can't very well write if you don't read at least a little bit. Reading other works helps you develop your own style. That is, by observing how published authors do it, you can pick up tips and get an understanding for how fiction in general works. As in, you need exposure in order to understand anything about what you're doing, even if you're not outright analyzing anything. It's not just for inspiration. It's for observing examples from your seniors.

To put it simply, you don't attempt to do brain surgery unless you study how it's done and observe first. All those doctors? Totally observe operations as med students before going in. Likewise, playing soccer? You can't really play very well unless your coach demonstrates moves to you first or until you go to practice and see how the other players train. And for a non-crappy answer, if you're trying to learn any form of martial arts, the first thing they have you do before doing anything else is get black belts to demonstrate moves and then have you repeat them.

As in, it's really just a given that you have to read at least a little bit in order to write. It helps exercise your imagination by forcing you to picture what's going on, and on top of that, you're picking up stylistic choices (examples of why grammar is vital, the difference between good and bad characterization, et cetera) as you go.

If you're going to do this, I would highly recommend not only reading a lot more (even challenging yourself to read more than ten a year) but also diversify yourself when it comes to genre. For example, don't just read romance. Read a little bit of everything. Don't knock it until you try it, as the old cliche goes. Branching out and reading a little of everything helps you sample a wide variety of styles and ideas.

Also, develop your own "inner narrator". There is a distinct difference between how someone would describe an event in real life and how a writer must describe an event in a piece of literature; and that ability to use a prose form, I believe, is what separates a noob from a newb. It's the concept of "show, don't tell," in that you can't go into it as though you are explaining the story to someone who's standing in front of you. Think of art; you can sketch out a very sparse drawing and explain the image to the person you're showing it to, but someone who is looking at it on their own needs to be able to discern its contents without outside explanation.

Once you can write in a prose form, you can set about developing your own style. Are you an informal writer or a formal writer? Do you put description into your story with mainly adjectives or descriptive verbs? Are you better at writing in first-person or third-person? If the latter, what style of third-person; subjective, objective, or omniscient?

-too lazy to type more-