There was a time, maybe 15 years ago or so, where I was fairly certain just about anything could be learned out of a book, if you were patient and went about learning intentionally.

To that end I read around three dozen books on how to write fiction.

Some of these were (and are) classics about writing in general, like Bird by Bird, On Writing, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit; some were more straight-forward nuts and bolts type books on dialogue, story structure, & building characters; plus a smattering of style and grammar guides like Strunk & White. I immersed myself in ‘how to’ books on writing, took notes (maybe I need to dig those out), and spent maybe six months going through and going back again to books like these, to see if somewhere someone had a flash of insight and managed to boil it down to “10 Rules You Should…” or “One Weird Trick”.

After all that, I did in fact come up with a lot of ideas and felt like, if I invested just a little more time and got to work I really could write a book. But here’s the plot twist: it would have been a book about writing. A book just like the dozens I had read.

…that I’d read back to back, one after the other, with an eye to study them and while taking notes and thinking about the sorts of things that were repeated in more than one book and the different angles each author took to the subject matter.

So what mattered wasn’t that I had picked up a bunch of books on writing. What mattered was how I read them. I studied them, like I was taking a class.

+1 for method. But overall: I’d made a mistake in choosing what to study

I would have been better off if I had spent those six months reading 25 novels – if my goal was to write a novel. I should have gone deep into one genre, or sub-genre, or niche genre, and read two dozen books that were pretty close to what I eventually wanted to write. Because if you read enough of the almost-same thing, and start to study the way the ideas are laid out, and the structure of it, eventually you’ll also get the shape of what your version of that book might look like. A book just like the dozens you’ve read, but *Your* version of that book.

I won’t tell you what you shouldn’t read; read a little bit of everything, & read what you enjoy. But if you want to write fiction, skip the how-to books, and read fiction. When setting off into unexplored territory, don’t just read about logistics and what to pack and how to prepare: know your route. Check out the paths others have taken to get to that border before you pick where to cross it.