Juiced On Writing

The official 50 Book Challenge has been around since 2003, but this year I decided to take up the challenge myself. As this is written in early February, I’m already approximately two to four books down on target, so may find myself cheating and choosing some relatively small books for me to read. I’m not sure children’s books count, either. But let’s have a look at the official challenge anyway…

The Official 50 Book Challenge

Started in 2003, The 50 Book Challenge runs on a livejournal blog. Users have access to post their own reviews of books they have read, following posting guidelines as per the User Info.

New users will typically wonder just what kind of reading they may “get away with” and the general response is – “What ever makes you happy”. The only principle provided by the official challenge is that readers should attempt to read 50 books during the year, approximately one per week.

Reading as a Trend

The official 50 Book Challenge remains running, but its popularity has spread virally, and you can now find many offline and online groups, perhaps even locally (some links below), who are challenging themselves to read a similar quantity of books per year – rebelling against the common statistics out there which are showing year by year that less adults are reading.

Book Groups are, happily, increasing against this trend also, and most nations are adding drives to emphasise reading as a holistic skill back into our educational systems – which will hopefully increase adult’s reading also as a side-benefit.

In the meantime, it appears a disciplined approach is needed for writers in getting back into that avid reading habit that some of us (myself included) may have lost. Challenges as goals to aim towards appear one way of setting this habit into concrete.

Reading Lots, From a Writer’s Perspective

There are many quotations from famous authors towards the art of writing being two things – reading lots and writing lots. Many writers advise that the best way to properly improve our writing and prose is by reading.

“Read Widely, and Read Often” anon.

“Whenever someone younger asks me for advice in writing, I always say ‘Read!’, because that will teach you what good writing is like, and you will recognize bad writing too.” JK Rowling.

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” Stephen King.

There are many of us who want to follow a writing career, and many of those people are quite content in using the Vanity Presses / Print on Demand services and giving away or selling their books to a small group of family and friends.

For those of us with slightly loftier hopes – in being published and seeing our books in local bookstores and libraries – then we have a job to do. We need to work out what is good reading in the genre or type of writing that we wish to write in ourselves. This involves studying books, and reading them. Lots of them.

Reading as a Writer

Reading as a Writer is a large subject in itself, and has been tackled in a few books, and through some school writing programs (Some links provided below for further reading). Teaching ourselves to swap between a reader’s eyes to that of a writer’s eyes can also be difficult at times, but I hope with practice will become almost second nature, without impacting the enjoyment of the book itself.

When reading my fifty books, I will attempt to follow a general pattern of investigation, especially when reading the genres I wish to write within. However, reading more broadly will also help my own education in what makes a good read. Some simple elements to watch out for -

• Plots and subplots, and how are these implemented through the story
• Ideas and Themes – how are these dealt with.
• The Organisation and Construction of the book – scenes, chapters, or sections for both non-fiction and fiction; beginnings, middles and endings of each; structural flow – linear, or not.
• Points of View / Voice
• Style and grammatical choice.
• Use of dialogue, description, exposition.
• Areas that bugged me and why.

Documenting Our Reading

Amongst some of the official 50 Book Challengers, there is a subsection of people who go to great lengths to provide reviews on the books they read. Many internet users have started Reading Blogs for that very reason. Others are happy with a simple book count widget counting up how many books they have ‘achieved’. Others are simply happy to count this for themselves.

As a writer, I feel that implementing some type of Reading Journal is of great importance. I’ve long known this as a theory, but never properly implemented it for myself until now. Quite coincidentally, my daughter is currently speeding through her own literature learnings at school – and is reading at several years above her age. Having quickly found her own reading ‘love’, she’s now reading many more books than her teacher appears to acknowledge of her, and we decided to provide a log of just what she is doing at home, both for her teacher’s sake, and as a wonderful record for my daughter when she is older.

This weekend we went looking for a little notebook or journal to become her own Reading Journal – one which she can simply enter the title of another book she’s read by herself in her bed at night. We eventually located a spiral notebook, and she’s already entered a couple of titles onto the first page.

At the same time, I purchased for myself a sturdy journal to document my own reading, including the writer analysis of my findings on each.  Having such Reading Journals has a fringe benefit, as both my daughter and I have found – we both want to be able to finish books to enter them into our journals. In fact, I’ve just taken possession of another shipment from Amazon of some of the writing books I’ve been wanting to get into.

LinkMes:

• The original Livejournal 50 Book Challenge
• 50 Book Challenge at LibraryThing
• 50 Book Challenge at Shelfari
• J-Kaye-Book-Blog – hosts lots of different challenges such as a 2009 E-Book Reading Challenge, 2009 Suspense & Thriller Challenge and a 2009 100+ [Books] Reading Challenge!
• Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (Book on Amazon – affiliate link)
• Read Like a Reader; Read Like a Writer (web page and PDF) – for students, but interesting looking at it from this perspective.
• Interested in some of the best writing books? Check out my Amazon store for my own recommendations.

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