Reading for Fun
As every teacher in every writing school around the world will tell you, one of the best ways to improve your own writing is to read other people's work. It can be hard, after sifting through nouns and adverbs at your computer all day, to do anything other than plop down on the couch and watch a mindless television reality show, but it will benefit you greatly if you can get into the habit of reading at least a magazine or even a few chapters of a book before bedtime every night.
You don't have to read anything that deals with your day-to-day research and writing — heck, you can re-read
Reading other writers' work is a terrific way to break out of any monotonous writing patterns into which you may have fallen. Simply seeing word choices that differ from your own vocabulary is a great way to perk up the creative-writing muscles in your brain. The stimulation is instantaneous, just part of the experience of reading for fun.
If you enjoy reading magazines, that's terrific, but don't limit yourself to reading only the publications for which you work (or aspire to work). Half the fun of reading is discovering new ideas, new voices, and new ways of putting words down onto the page.
Fiction Is Your Friend
A lot of magazine writers shy away from reading fiction. It's a gut reaction of sorts, one that likely stems from the fact that magazine writers earn their money by writing nonfiction. After you spend hours upon hours collecting quotes and doing research for magazines that cover everything from bicycle technology to online postage systems — as if those topics were as important as peace on Earth itself — you can find yourself feeling that fiction is a little, well, hokey. The truth is that reading fiction can be a wonderful break from reality, as well as a fabulous way of helping the writer in you learn new techniques for developing characters and incorporating dialogue into your work.
As a nonfiction magazine writer, you never want to invent dialogue or characters in your articles. You'll be fired and, likely, blackballed for years. However, you can use some of the same techniques that fiction writers do to enhance the quotes and descriptions of real people you interview for your stories.
Paying attention to the way good fiction writers pattern their paragraphs, and the sentences within them, will certainly help you to make your own nonfiction writing livelier. Even better, you'll probably notice the rhythm of whatever you're reading without even having to try. It's sort of like learning by osmosis, with the added bonus of getting to read an interesting story along the way.
Reading fiction will also help you to see how good writers develop characters over the course of a piece — by leaving little clues, like breadcrumbs, for the reader to follow page after page. You can use a similar technique when writing narrative nonfiction articles for magazines, and your articles — while fully factual — will take on the tone of a great mystery or romance novel.
Ideas Are Everywhere
Reading for fun is also the easiest way to keep up with who the hottest writers are at any given time. Picking up a copy of
Keep a notepad and pen handy at all times. You never know when a book or article you're reading will spark an idea for a related nonfiction article that you can sell, and you'll want to write the idea down so that you can promptly forget about it and go back to reading for fun.
That's not to say that you should read these types of things for fun if they don't interest you. Remember, the point is to recharge your creative juices, not to feel as though you're trapped in some energy-sapping study group. But if you find keeping up with national trends of interest, there's no reason you can't get your relaxation fix while at the same time allowing terrific story ideas of your own to percolate in the back of your mind.
