Have you ever read a book by an author with a particularly powerful voice and later found yourself writing or even thinking in that voice? I recently experienced this again reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The combination of the first-person narrator and his distinct medieval mindset created a voice that wouldn’t leave my head for days.

Such voices can be a problem when trying to write consistently in your own style and voice. It can be jarring to work on a story of your own, only to reread it later and realize that you were apparently channeling another writer. Some authors prevent this problem by not reading any fiction when they are working on a novel. Nonfiction usually has a less distinctive authorial voice. Reading nonfiction alone, however, causes its own problems.

In order to write novels, you have to read novels.
It’s important to have an instinctive understanding of the underlying structure, flow, pacing, and other elements that make up a novel, as opposed to a short story or a poem. It’s necessary to have a good technical understanding of what you’re writing, but the instinctive understanding is absolutely essential and that’s only achievable by reading what you want to write.

One of the easiest traps to fall into when learning a craft like writing is to only read about novels, rather than reading examples of the kind of writing you would like to do. It’s easy to feel like you’re making progress by reading endless books about writing, but I guarantee you’ll struggle if you sit down to write and can’t call up any real examples from novels you’ve read.

I have to consciously encourage myself to seek out fiction to read. I’m so easily disappointed in fiction, and it’s more straightforward to glean something “useful” from a half-read nonfiction book than from a novel. I need to stop thinking this way though. If I tried a little harder, I could learn a lot from the fiction I haven’t enjoyed. Why didn’t I enjoy it? Did I not like the characters, the author’s style, the pacing? Everything I didn’t like is a lesson for what I want to do differently when it comes to writing my own fiction. I can learn more by studying examples than by trying to apply some hazy concept I once read in a book about writing.

Ground yourself in your own voice.
If you’re afraid of being influenced by another author’s voice, don’t stop reading fiction. Instead, take time each day to reestablish your own voice. Try morning pages or timed writing each day when you wake up or as a way to begin your regular writing session. I find it helpful to take a few minutes to freewrite out all the junk: random thoughts from the day, worries about what a terrible writer I am, and the echoes of other writers I may have read recently. Then I begin my current writing project. It gets me in the mood to write before I put pressure on myself to continue writing my story.

Just as it’s true that you are what you eat, you are what you read. Make sure your reading contributes to your goals as a writer by immersing yourself in the literature you want to create.

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