After the recent resurgence of a topic that’s nearly two years old – but never out of date because Candy’s entry on that topic of writers vs. reviewers is damntasticly and fabulous – I had a similar question: if you’re a writer of fiction, does it lessen your enjoyment of fiction when you read it? Can writers read and lose themselves in a book or do technical details distract from the enjoyment?
Reading with the intention to review has certainly altered the way I read, from the mechanical element wherein I mark pages or write notes to myself in the margin, to the thought process wherein I am constantly evaluating what is working and what isn’t. Suddenly I’m disappointed by a decision the character made – before reviewing, I’d probably think little of it, but now that I put myself to the task of explaining why I’m disappointed, I pay more attention to the narrative, and the skills used to develop it. But overall, I still dig romance and have a good old time reading it. Thank goodness!
But what happens when you cross the line from reading into crafting the read? Does writing decrease reading enjoyment? I suspect this is true for some and not true for others, obviously, but I have to ask those writers reading the page: has becoming a writer, crossing that line from entertainment recipient to entertainment provider, lessened your enjoyment, or changed the way you read?
One more thing: being over-focused on the actual writing doesn’t clue me in on *only* the bad parts, which I should have mentioned. Sometimes I come across a particularly lovely turn of a phrase and just *can’t get over it*. Seriously, there’s nothing quite like the rush of YES YES THAT’S IT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN! THAT’S JUST WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED!, even when it’s by proxy.
I generally don’t read the kind of fiction I write. When I’ve tried, I have in fact found myself “red penning” my way through it. And, yup, that does tend to suspend the suspension-of-disbelief process.
Even the big guns’ output affects me this way. (OY, you can’t begin to imagine how I reacted to a Sherrilyn Kenyon novella I read in the past year. I actually sat down and wrote a review of it—not for publication, mind you, but for my own steam-release!)
So I read either nonfiction—history and theology, mostly—or fiction that’s largely unrelated to what I’m producing. H.P. Lovecraft. Ian McEwan. Poetry. But nothing smacking of contemporary romance.
For the most part, yes, it ruins the book for me. I have a hard time turning the internal editor off. It’s hard to do when I’m very focused on trying to make my work the best it can be, and the internal editor is in overdrive almost 24/7.
Stylistic issues bother me more than grammatical ones these days. I’ve learned to tell when a writer judiciously breaks the rules, and when they just don’t know them. And there are books I’ve read where the writer’s voice and prose style are brilliant, but she was cursed with a sucktastic copy editor.
All that being said, when I do come across a book so well written I can turn off the internal editor, I am completely blown away. These I appreciate far more than before I started writing.