Member-only story
The Power of Reading Books From Different Genres
Learn from different genres to improve your writing style
High school had murdered my love for fiction. So I hopped on the personal development bandwagon and started reading the classics: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, The 48 Laws of Power, and other widely loved self-improvement books. For around a year, I only read self-help books. I learned a lot, but at some point, I stopped learning. Every author wrote in the same way; every story was already in another book; every book was the same book. I was reading the same book over and over and over.
When I read self-help books, my writing shaped into a form that resembled a person telling another to fix their life. Of course, this was a result of the authors I was reading passing their style down to me. Since personal development books were the only books I read, the style of their authors was the only style I could write. Then, I started reading autobiographies and memoirs. My writing changed: I added personal stories and factual narratives. Later, somewhere along the line of becoming a voracious reader, I found love for fiction again. And thus, myths, storytelling, rhetoric, and other idiosyncrasies became a part of my writing.
I noticed a pattern: every time I read a book, I learned a part of the author’s way of writing. I had been taking my favorite elements, and I had integrated them into my work. I wanted to improve my writing. I had been unintentionally reading books from different genres, and it was time to make it intentional. It worked.
Explore different styles
The most impactful benefit of reading from different genres is that you expose yourself to different writing styles. Of course, every book is different, but every genre has certain conventions that authors of the books follow. Every self-help book has an author that tells you what to do; every memoir has deeply personal stories that hit you in the gut; every bildungsroman has a protagonist that learns from his experiences.
If you want to write like an author from a specific genre, then, by all means, only read from that genre. But for the rest of us who want to find their voice, it’s of great…
