Extreme Writing Makeover Lesson 3 - Reading

Daphne Gray-Grant's week 3 lesson emphasizes reading widely, copying and practicing writing styles I want to emulate.  Here is the homework I will focus on.


HOMEWORK:
Part 1:
Identify the type of writing you want to improve.  Blogs.  Memoirs.  Fiction.
Identifying some excellent examples of this kind of writing.  Find a place on your computer or in a file or bookshelf where you can store it.


Part 2:
Set some reading goals for yourself – it’s a good idea to commit to read x number of pages per day (you set the “x”). Then create a file on your hard drive and keep a diary about what you’ve read. All truly effective goals are measurable and recordable. And, yes, reading is important enough that it should be measured.

My interest in memoirs has revived in the past two weeks, since the Carlson Family reunion.  This week I added several titles to my reading list on the Kindle.  One of the free ebooks is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which the Introductory Note says that this is one of the best memoirs ever written. I'm reading it now.  I agree it's good, and interesting.  That's reason enough to emulate.  Make my story interesting to someone reading 300 years from now.


Concurrent to this writing course, my daughter is taking a course in writing fiction.  I read  mostly fiction. From a brief conversation with her, I conclude that I read commercial fiction.  I keep a log of what I read at the back of my handwritten journal.  I write book reviews for myself in the journal.  I will add fiction to my list of goals for improved writing.  Now the challenge is to be more discriminating between commercial fiction and good writing.  I would choose Stieg Larsson for good writing, and Jayne Ann Krenzt as an example of commercial fiction that I might emulate.


The Kindle has allowed me to add other genres to my reading list quickly.   I often choose fiction before I finish a title from another genre.  One of the goals I may never achieve is to actually finish reading a book every week. Some of the titles are books that stand alone within a compilation.  I don't always give myself credit by listing those standalone titles.   I may read one or two hours a day.  One feature I like on the Kindle is I can always go back to where I left off, sometimes a week or more later.


To be specific, The Works of Ovid, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Stories, The Jungle Book, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland all are on my Kindle, and worthy of emulating.