tritrekker

I have come to the conclusion that reading everything, even the most terribly written piece of slop you can find, is imperative to the creative process. If anything, reading the bad may be even more important than reading the good. To find what you enjoy reading is important. It teaches you what works in creating a story. But reading what appalls your good sense is equally important because the more you despise it the less likely you are to repeat it's mistakes. Yes you may detest the bad literary prose and the sloppy sentence structure. You may mock the plot and one sided characters. But you will remember why it did not work.
To read only what you like will make you complacent and you will forget what drives you to excel in story making. This kind of struck me just a few minutes ago. I could not believe I missed it before. I had been thinking about how to progress and evolve my writing and I started thing about what I dislike in writing and realized with the exception of a few free short stories I have gotten on my kindle in the past six month I have not been reading anything except for what I really want to for a long time. If something is out of the genres I enjoy or the style is of one I am not a fan I tend not to read it. And the only examples of poor writing is generally self-published things from people I will never meet. Intriguing thought.