Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Essential Books to Read in Their Essential Order if You Want to be a Writer

(Spoilers for Frankenstein.)
This is for those fandomeers who want to make other fandomeers just as happy as they are someday, by being a writer. Cool! I want to do that too! So now that you have this desire to write, you probably want to learn a lot about your profession. Reading other books is the best way to learn about writing. It helps develop your style, plus you know the ways that you absolutely do not want to write if you didn't like the book. So, in my personal opinion, and as a fandomeer I would trust my opinion, these are the books you should read if you want to be a writer in the order you should read them, and if you're curious as to why, I'll tell you that too.
1. Harry Potter. This is the basis of all fiction literature. Don't believe the haters. It's good stuff and it'll teach you a lot. You need to start with this because it has it all. It has an entertaining story, which is a pretty important part of writing fiction if that is what you desire to write. Do you want a plot that has so many secret things, pieces that make you think, and mind-blowing moments? J.K. Rowling's masterpiece has so many of those things you won't even know what to do with your life. You'll have plenty of experience with surprising the readers. And lastly, Harry Potter is, of course besides the pieces of wizardry and things, the most realistic work of fiction I've ever read. The people act like people. Most people in books act like people, but not to this level. If a teenage boy would do it in real life, then Harry and Ron will certainly be doing it too. So many things you can learn in seven books.
2. Hunger Games. Now that you've learned the so-much-more-than-basic basics of writing, now you can go into something deeper. Suzanne Collins can teach you how to write some seriously intense stuff. Your readers won't even know what to do with their lives until they've read every single page of your book. These books can teach you how to do that probably more than any other book in the world. And this is especially relevant to you if you like to write in first person. Hunger Games can teach you how to narrate. Sure, there's the dialogue, and that alone is amazing. But one of my favorite parts of reading Hunger Games is listening to Katniss's thoughts and monologues. They are seriously well-written paragraphs of Katniss just thinking. And some people cannot achieve that. (Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I'm reading in school. It was pretty dull listening to Victor being devastated after Justine's trial.) If you want to know how to write some dialogueless narrations, this is the trilogy for you.
3. Percy Jackson and the Olympians. At this point in your writing research you've learned about plot structure, realism, keeping the reader interested and narration, you should learn more about writing elements and how to enhance those plot structures and narrations. These books are a perfect example. If I do say so myself, Percy is a hilarious kid. They way he thinks and how he and his friends talk is so perfect, I just love it. And if you want to know other elements of writing. For example, Rick Riordan is pretty much the kind of similes because of this series. Read the series and you will discover how to write a simile your readers will love. It always adds a little bit of fun and excitement to a story to having some good elements of literature in there.
4. The Chronicles of Narnia. Yay!!! You've learned how to develop not only a story, but your personal writing style! C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia can do two things for you. It can help you review what you know already. These are some seriously good plots, I was so surprised about the ending of the series, I was hooked in the chapter about the magician's book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the first paragraph in The Magician's Nephew is written so well with so much description I don't even know what to do with my life, not to mention they can be pretty humorous at times. And maybe you like your story to have a moral or a point behind it, or maybe you want them to be symbolic to something. These books can teach you about that. For those of you who don't know, C.S. Lewis was a very religious man and this series is highly based on Christianity. The symbolism is seriously cool. I love it.
5. The Heroes of Olympus. You've learned all the essentials to writing a story! This last series I added to the books everyone should read because they are quite as good as Percy Jackson, plus if you're a Percy Jackson fandomeer and you haven't read these books then everyone is talking about them and you'll be kind of left out. But they can help you with writing, too: If you want to write a successful spinoff, this is how it's done, friends.

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