“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
A couple of months ago, I met a girl on Bumble. As an adult who has moved from country to country, state to state, city to city, it’s always nice to have some friends in the area. Bumble has a BFF feature that helped me make genuine friends while I moved from one place to another. But since the pandemic, I redownloaded the app because I was bored one day and sad that I couldn’t see my co-workers. I was hoping to find someone who lived a couple of minutes away who I could connect with on a girl-bond level. Don’t get me wrong, my husband is my best friend but he draws the line on discussing romance stories. HAH!
I came upon this girl’s profile and thought she was interesting. Her profile said that we’d most likely get along if we read books. I’m trying to surround myself with people who would motivate me to read more. I’m trying to broaden my library and as a writer, I need to keep up with the trends and keep my mind fresh with storytelling. The beginning of the pandemic wasn’t a great time for me. I wasn’t motivated to read or write. I was doing a lot of writing for work but no writing for myself, and the only creative thing I did was practice illustration which didn’t exactly leave much room for storytelling.
I swiped right on this girl and we matched. I sent her a message first and asked her “Quick, what’s your favorite book?” and we immediately hit it off. I quickly found out she is a bookworm on steroids and her fiance has been trying to get her to lessen the piles of books she has in their apartment. I was more than happy to take some of them off her plate. She gave me some of her favorite books (she had multiple copies of them!) and asked me what I thought about them, which motivated me to go through the pile she gave me in a couple of days.
I haven’t told her yet but she is the one that stoked the fire of my writing motivation lately. The books she gave me were compelling and inspiring. She introduced me to the works of Colleen Hoover and Ashley Poston. The books were mostly YA and new adult contemporary which is the niche I’ve decided to focus on. In turn, I began to look more into authors of the genre and got hooked with Gloria Chao’s stories which also address culture clash (something I thought about writing for a long time now).
Reading all these books gave me introspection on how I write my novels. Did I give my characters layers? What else did they yearn for beyond romance? How can I add depth and emotion to the scenes I write and make my readers cry as much as these authors made me cry? I looked at myself and the body of work I was drafting. It was a sobering experience. I’ve come to realize my stories were shallow compared to the novels I read, and that’s where the difference lies. I began to work. I found myself outlining character descriptions, writing likable and unlikeable traits about them. I thought over scenes for every chapter and tried to make sense of why they could be significant in the story (and not because it sounds like it could make for a good movie moment). I dug deeper into the world where my characters lived, what kind of society are they living in and what are they trying to change.
I’m aware that we writers are our worst critics, and we should be. There was a lot to be done with my own writing, and I wouldn’t have realized that if I wasn’t reading. It’s hard to write something amazing when you’re not reading anything at all. Reading grants us a view of what stories we enjoy and the depths we’re willing to explore. If we, as readers, can’t be satisfied by shallow, stereotypical storylines and one-dimensional characters, why should we, as writers, write them?