Why I Quit Reading Novels
During my apprentice years as an aspiring novelist (1967-82), I had to overcome a serious handicap: I didn’t know anything about writing novels. Growing up in a little town in the Texas Panhandle, where would I have learned?
In college, I took writing classes. After college, I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and read books on literary criticism. The most common advice to young writers was that they should read and study the novels of other authors. Read everything!
That sounded reasonable, though it wasn’t an easy assignment for a slow reader like me. Over the next several years, I did a great deal of reading: popular novels, literary fiction, classics, and novels by Texas authors. I tried to incorporate an author’s style and technique into the stories I was writing. Sometimes I made elaborate plot maps on rolls of paper.
I had great respect for Alexander Dumas and considered The Count of Monte Christo a great novel. I studied the novels of Mark Twain, Dostoyevsky, Margaret Mitchell, Tolstoy, Mailer, Updike, Nabokov, McMurtry, Larry King, and many others.
I discovered the novels of Herman Wouk and made a serious study of his technique.
I was attracted to the novels of Elmer Kelton. He wrote lucid prose and told good stories, and we shared the same cultural background: ranching. He had succeeded in writing novels about a place that many people in the publishing world considered “too regional:” West Texas.
At one time, I would have been content to imitate his success and become an author of entertaining, well-written, well-researched novels set in West Texas.
I was stalking The Novel—the concept, the essence. What is it, how does it work, what is it supposed to do? I followed that plan for five years. Then, in 1983, I stopped reading fiction and haven’t read a novel since then.
That sounds odd, so let me explain.
