Should You Read Other Novels While Writing Yours?
Some say “No way”
The great short story writer Andre Dubus (senior, not junior) was speaking at a Boston event when I was in grad school. I was studying Faulkner at the time and I knew he revered him. I asked if he still read Faulkner, and he said no.
“His style’s too infectious,” he said.
I heard that same thing when I was an editor for the Los Angeles Times book section. I worked with lots of writers, and few of them read other novelists while working on their novels. At least that’s what they said.
I used to think this attitude was the right one. That was before I wrote a novel. I was thinking like a critic, and it made sense to me then. You didn’t want to have your writer’s voice stained by another’s influence, right? You had to be original, not derivative. The D-word applied to the worst writers. They were the literary equivalent of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
I understood why that attitude appealed to me and other critics — comparing writer’s voices and judging whether or not they were derivative could become a full-time occupation. It gave you plenty to write about. It fooled publishers, too. Some were even willing to publish book-long screeds about this idea of original writing vs. derivative writing (I’m sure we’ve all read some of them).
