Reading and Writing Every Day
We’ve all heard you need to write every day. Have you thought about reading every day? Today I updated my links, and if you ever have the time, explore the bottom of my sidebar. While going through my subscriptions to find those links, I noticed I had two sites that supplied free, frequent, short fiction of my genres. I’m not sure if writers who read every day specifically perform better, but I’d guess yes. These are free and entertaining resources. Why not give reading every day a try?
Avenir Eclectia
No, I don’t write for Avenir Eclectia. Not yet. 😉 This is a really neat thing these authors have going.
Daily Science Fiction
Daily Science Fiction is a free e-zine. There’s a flash fiction piece every day Monday through Thursday, and a longer piece on Friday for the weekend. Daily Science Fiction’s name is slightly deceiving: although most of what’s published is science fiction, but fantasy and slipstream are less than shunned.
What impresses me with this e-zine is the quality of the fiction. I can always expect very entertaining and creative works. Reading the day’s flash fiction before I start my daily outlining/worldbuilding/writing/editing opens my mind.
Do you have a favorite place to read your genre?
Posted on September 20, 2011, in Not Directly Writing Related, Science Fiction, Useful Sites and tagged Avenir Ecletia, Daily Science Fiction, e-zine, flash fiction, reading, vignette. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Scribbling on the Computer 
Hi Kathrine. Using that site sounds like a great idea. I love short fiction. It gets a bit tiring only making my way through a few pages of a long book when I get a chance. And when I’m trying to buy books, I often get bogged down reading reviews, which sometimes seem to be better than the book could ever be; I can only assume this as I often just move on. Reviews are all well and good, but they’re not fiction: there’s a lot to get out of the meta aspect, but …
Most of my reading is spent reading my own writing when writing and editing. While it’s inadvisable to be exclusive about it, so is reading too much fiction to the exclusion of wider knowledge. Wider reading in many different areas of non-fiction etc etc for years and years is incredibly important in adding significance to your narrative content, and will only serve us well in future. You can see successful authors floundering as they write more and more books and run dry of theory and insight; they’re either only reading their own writing or they’re also just reading other people’s fiction, which will only get you so far for so long. Anyway … thanks for the link!
OlsenJayNelson, what you said about reading in other genres is very true, and I heartily agree! It’s natural to give special attention to your favorite genres, but it’s very important – especially for writers – to get variety. Your voice and, like you said, content will benefit.
Now that we’re talking about about reading widely, I just realized my top five favorite books cover quite a tidy bit of genres. Haha.
Great suggestion, I’ve heard one author say that if you write four hours a day you must read for hours a day to become a good writer. Not sure if it’s true, but it seems like good advice. (Maybe not to that extreme, though.)
Hey Mike. Nice to see you here. 🙂
Matching writing and reading time exactly is an interesting idea, and not necessarily extreme, especially for someone in a learning stage. It’s not uncommon to focus on one to the exclusion of the other. 😛 I might have to try it for a while just to see what that does.