Learning from other writers – reading other writers – is the best way for you to study and learn your craft. You don’t give up reading for pleasure in favor of book analysis. You can learn a lot simply by being exposed to good writing, without overthinking it. You can also read a book through once for pleasure and refer back to it for writing lessons and examples. But the important thing is to read.
In an article for Writer’s Digest, Amy Jones shares three things she learned reading L.A. Weather by María Amparo Escandón. The novel follows three generations of the Alvarado family as they navigate traumatic experiences and consider what it means to be family. Here’s what Jones learned:
- Focus on a small cast. While the novel encompasses a large family, it focuses on one married couple, their three children, and their housekeeper as the main cast. “Readers see things from many different perspectives, but because it’s kept to tight group interacting with each other, we don’t get confused or overwhelmed,” Jones says.
- Weather can be a character without taking over. Weather events shadow many scenes and one character becomes obsessed with the Weather Channel.
- Don’t show every moment. L.A. Weather takes place over the course of a year, but the reader doesn’t experience every day. “In L.A. Weather, each month is a chapter and only a few days appear as subsections of that chapter,” Jones notes. “For example, when one character has a medical emergency, we don’t need to follow her day-by-day progress, but rather, we see representative moments. In other words, just hit the highlights.”
