I’ve read the tip many times that all writers should read widely through different genres, not just sticking to their personal favourites. I have to admit, this is advice I usually ignore, because I figure there are only so many reading hours in my life, and I don’t want to waste them reading stuff that’s not really down my alley.

Of course, I was wrong. Thankfully, I’ve been pushed out of my literary fiction corner for a few moments recently and have seen the benefits of (at least occasionally) stepping out of my favourite genre corner.

What I’ve learnt from science fiction

Of all the genres that I was never likely to read, science fiction is probably at the top of the list. Okay, second, after horror (and I still don’t think you’ll see me in the horror section of a bookshop or library for a long time). Yet I was persuaded that there is sci-fi that is still “great writing”, that sometimes it’s just all about the characters and therefore not too different to what I usually read. It was worth a try.

So far I’ve read (and to my surprise, enjoyed) Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Jack Vance’s Marune: Alastor 993. As promised, they were beautifully written and had great storylines, two of my usual criteria for whether or not I enjoy a book. And the stuff I’d feared – endless descriptions of spaceship constructions or anything slightly Star-Wars-esque that I wanted to avoid – was barely there at all. (That’s excluding, of course, my problem with the footnotes in Marune – although I am almost convinced that this is acceptable in scifi).

The result of reading these scifi books (and I’m now onto another - Ender’s Shadow) is that my writing brain has been opened up a whole lot – would you believe, I’ve even had story ideas that have a scifi twist? I don’t think I’m about to become a scifi author (far from it) but a short story or two is not out of the question. In general, the idea of opening up your thinking to beyond the reality you know and accept is a great lesson for me.

And what I’ve learnt from historical sagas

At my local library, they have an entire section for family sagas – stories that follow families down through generation after generation – another kind of novel that I’ve definitely never been interested in. I guess that another book I’ve just read, Judy Nunn’s Beneath the Southern Cross, falls into this category, and again, I enjoyed it despite myself.

The reason I read it is weird in itself. My mother recommended it to me, and the bit that grabbed me was the family in question is the Kendle/Kendall family. Since I’m a Kendle, I was naturally interested in a (fictional) story of a Kendall family, and particularly the Kendle half who changed their name to disassociate from the other side of the family after a falling out. (I wonder if that part is true?)

In any case, although I’m still sure this is not really my kind of genre, I enjoyed the book and in particular, was impressed with some of the “show, don’t tell” examples I found in it. Every 100 or so pages, the story jumped a generation or two, and Nunn used small, seemingly incidental situations or details to clue the reader in to who the new characters were and how they were related to the previous generation’s characters. It must have been tempting – and I would have been quite forgiving about it – to just summarise the new generation, but she didn’t. And I was impressed.

What’s your “love to hate” genre?

What genre do you never read? Let us know in the comments and hopefully someone else will suggest a good book for you to try if you want to expand your genre experience a bit. I really recommend it!

Thanks to niallkennedy for image via CC