Reading is an essential aspect to becoming a skilled writer, just as the ingredients in Orovo are essential nutrients for your body. Reading, it could be said, is Orovo for the mind. Not reading enough is a mistake made by many young authors.

The excuse seems to make sense. “Well, I don’t want to be too influenced by someone else’s ideas, so I don’t read much, especially the kind of stuff I want to write.”

The trouble with that is, then you simply are not a student of the genre of book you’re working on, and your chances of avoiding cliche, or worse, reinventing the wheel, are not in your favor.

Ask any comic book writer, for example, what he read growing up, and comic books will almost always be near the top of his or her list. Ask a horror novelist what they read and, boom, horror is bound to be a big influence on them.

Rather than playing an undue influence, it helps you learn what’s already been done, what hasn’t been explored, what’s been done to death and what works.

So even though I’m currently writing the first in what I hope will be a series of mystery novels, you won’t find me steering clear of the mystery section. On the contrary, I’ve read all of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels, I’m a long-time James Patterson fan, I’m devouring books by Charlaine Harris right now, and once I’ve read through all of her stuff, I’ll be moving on to others.

Read, read, and once you tire of that… read some more!

I recently had a chance to hear from my old writing mentor, MSU-Mankato writing professor and novelist Terry Davis. Davis was pivotal to my development as a writer and I recently jotted off an email to him, bringing him up-to-date on my writing career since my college years ended 16 years ago.

Davis is still an active writer and busy professor, but he took some time to reply and still offer a few words of encouragement. It’s nice to know that after all this time and all the students who’ve come and gone in the time since I was under his tutelage, he still remembers me.

While I have a basic respect for all teachers, rare are the ones who become real mentors to you. Davis was probably the most influential on my life. Anyone who hasn’t read Vision Quest, Mysterious Ways, or If Rock-N-Roll Were A Machine, It’d Be A Motorcycle are really missing out. Although he works in the young adult genre, there’s little in his work that meditates on the trivial aspects of growing up, like acne; Davis’ novels are mediations on the nature of being alive, no matter what age one might be.

One doesn’t need a Sony Vaio to be a great writer, although it helps if you like to write while away from home. Personally, I have far worse writing habits.

Most of my writing is producing laying on my stomach on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, neck craned up at an uncomfortable angle to see my screen, and usually late at night. And my PC of choice is a powerful desktop system fully outfitted with the latest version of Microsoft Office 2007. Although it began out of necessity, it’s not part of my writing routine and I’m not sure I’d immediately be as productive if I suddenly invested in a computer desk and a comfortable chair to sit in.

Although it’d probably be a lot easier on my neck. Maybe I should think about it a bit more.

Although poisons are a staple of the mystery genre, they are quite annoying when it comes right down to it. For dramatic purposes, one wants a poison to act in certain ways at a certain time, and to be relatively hard to detect.

Trouble is, reality has a way of being inconvenient to dramatic purposes. Take naturally-occurring poisons as an example.

Rhubarb leaves contain a rather effective poison. Yet the quantity needed to produce a fatal poisoning would equal several very large salads, would take too long to prove fatal, and would be obvious as the source of death by any cursory examination of the victim’s digestive tract.

Hardly the stuff of effective stealth poisoning. They’re as obvious as a set of ellipticals in the middle of a domestic living room.

I guess it’s true what a fellow writer and poison expert recently told me: allergies are often the better way to go.

This week, I have to write a 30-minute sermon as well as a 10-15-minute Torah commentary for my church. That’s about 40-45 pages of sermonizing, and I’ll probably get it done in an evening or two, since I’ve already done most of my research.

I’m about that many pages into my novel after working on it for nearly three months now. I’m not discouraged by the comparison, though; sermons are far easier to write than novels.

Sermons, by their nature, are polemics. You express opinion, share wisdom and insight from research, and generally bring it all together under a common theme.

Novels, by comparison, are a far more complex task. You have to track the lives and personalities of dozens of “cast members,” and have them behave believably in a variety of situations. It’s not always easy to figure out how that will serve the plot, and of course the plot itself consumes time to work out and develop correctly.

With a sermon, there are no such concerns. In that respect, it’s a lot like delivering a lecture in an academic setting, though a lecture is basically a sermon on diet pills.

Make note of this on your micro SD chip: always remember to look for unique ways to describe common events. That helps set your work apart from the rest.

I love using an example from my college writing professor, Terry Davis. In one of his manuscripts, he has a man get into a moment of violence that ends when another character takes a shot at him and blows the man’s hand off.

Now, an unimaginative writer would probably describe such an event fairly mundanely. Like so:

Ron took his shot at me, and my hand exploded, showering me with blood.

“You shot my hand off, you bastard,” I screamed at him.

Kind of thing that can happen quite often in an action sequence, right? But that’s not how Davis described the event at all. Instead, Davis described the moment of the shot like so:

…and my hand dissolved into a fine cranberry mist.

See how much more memorable that sounds? Always remember that there are fresh ways to describe even the most common of events.

Learning the specifics of your characters is important before you put pen to paper. You might be able to recite certain speeches you want them to deliver, or their motivations and backstory, but is that enough?

Those are your big payoff moments, but it can take sometimes 200-300 pages to build up to the earliest of those moments, and you need to build character in the meantime, before you get there. So knowing the trivia about your characters is important, also, and is what will set them apart from generic, indistinct stock characters.

Does your science teacher prefer to go bird-watching using field glasses (boring) or a set of Nikon rifle scopes? Clearly, the second option is more creative and unique and makes that character immediately more intriguing, even if you don’t yet know that his father beat him with a dead parakeet when he was 10, until page 354.

One of the things I find some writers struggle with is a fear of creating characters who are “too weird” to be “believable.” Whenever I hear this, I love to have them sit down and watch the two-hour movie debut of the old and short-lived ABC TV mystery, Twin Peaks.

There’s no one weirder than that cast of characters, in general. And of them, few are odder ducks than the Log Lady. And yet, over 15 years after it went off the air, it is characters like the Log Lady who I still remember most clearly from that show. She’s indelibly etched into my computer memory. And it wasn’t until deep into the series that you were told why she talked to the log she always carried around; her backstory, once revealed, made her all the more memorable.

So there’s two lessons to be learned: don’t be afraid to let at least some of your characters be so weird that you begin to wonder if they’re realistic. They don’t have to be, not completely. They just have to be sympathetic in the long run.

And the other lesson is: don’t reveal backstory too soon or two completely. If we’d known all there was to know about the Log Lady in that first two hours of Twin Peaks, she wouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating as the mystery of her made her.

As I’ve dug into writing my Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less, one of the fun things I’ve been able to do is create my own fictional setting. Although based heavily on places I have lived, this setting is a mixture of enough of them that I’ve fictionalized it.

My novel will be set in the relatively small city of Hope, Wisconsin. There is no such place (that I know of), but it is based on nearly five years of living in small rural towns in northwestern Wisconsin as a journalist. While Hope is, by necessity, a bit bigger than several of the towns I knew, the flavor and character of those towns will all be found, part and parcel, throughout Hope.

From the Packers-loving retired elementary school teacher selling cheap auto insurance, who I introduce early in my novel, to the suddenly-single-parent county Sheriff who is featured throughout, all of my characters are tiny bits and pieces of people I actually knew, reassembled into a pastiche of all of them.

Getting to know the character and flavor of an area can be a great training ground for building a believable fictional world, based on but not exactly reflecting the real people you encounter while living there.

One of the things that has been driven home to me by reading the novels of Charlaine Harris is how important setting is to the success of a novel. It is the uniquess of Harris’ Bonne Temps, Louisiana, setting for her Sookie Stackhouse novels that helps to make her vampire-centric mysteries uniqe from Laurel K. Hamilton’s New York setting for her Antia Blake novels.

Sure, there are other differences in tone and writing style; but the setting is what gives each novel flavor and texture and uniqueness. It’s like the difference between an LA townhouse and a two-story colonial set on some prime Wilmington NC real estate.

One of the damaging elements of TV shows and movies is that probably two-thirds of mass media entertainment is set in either New York or Los Angeles. Yet that is so incredibly limiting. And I’ve seen many a young fiction writer attempt to seem sophisticated by setting their stories in New York or Los Angeles just to fit in, despite growing up nowhere near those settings.

That’s what makes novels fun. Harris knows how to embrace her Southern roots, so her fictional worlds have a style all their own. While any soulless screenwriter can fake a New York or Los Angeles vampire story, only someone from the Deep South, like Harris, could write about Bonne Temps, LA, convincingly.