Don’t put down a bad book

Now I know what you’re thinking: why would I torture myself and drag my eyes through and read, skim, at best, something that has completely and utterly lost my attention?

Well, as a writer you should really, really try to understand why it has lost your attention. Some of the best advice I’ve gotten as a writer is:

write what you like to read

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You know what you like to read, so why is whatever you’re reading not connecting with you. Dissect it, figure it out. Writing is very important as a writer. Practice makes better, as my grandma likes to say, but something that is very important is understanding the concepts of writing. Concepts are important. They’re not as tangible as practice, but once you grasp them, implementing them into your practices will make them easier.

That aside, the process it goes through when dissecting is as follows:

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

First, I establish if this is something that just for lack of a better word is not for me, that’s when I can recognize that it is written well and the characters are developed and so is…