Welcome to my stop of The Cure blog tour, which is written by Bradlee Frazier! We have a great guest post from the author! Enjoy!
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HOW READING NONFICTION MAKES YOU A BETTER FICTION AUTHOR, OR, WHAT I LEARNED FROM SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
I had an epiphany while I was watching the movie Slumdog Millionaire. If you’ve not see it, it is about a young Indian boy who has a very hard life and then goes on to win the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The premise is that his life’s experiences prepared him to overcome an offer to cheat and to answer each of the increasingly difficult questions on the TV game show to win the money, defeat the bad guy and get the girl. For example, his love of cricket (the game, not the insect) and his study of that game provide him with the right answer at a critical time in the game.
As I was writing my novel The Cure, I had a similar epiphany. All my life I have had an interest in nonfiction books. As a kid, I would pour over the hard copy editions of the World Book Encyclopedia my dad had purchased, much to my mom’s chagrin, from a door-to-door salesman. In those volumes, I read about various countries and political events and units of currency. In elementary school they kept dictionaries on our desks so we could look up words when needed. I used to read the dictionary when I had finished as assignment and was waiting for the next topic to begin, studying words like cacophony and verisimilitude, because I liked the way they sounded and wanted to know their meanings and origins.
In the bookstore, my wife will wander over to the horror novels, but I find myself in front of the discounted nonfiction titles, looking for a deal. On our last trip to Barnes and Noble, for example, I picked up This is Your Brain on Music and Quadrivium: A Study of the Four Liberal Arts, and I have since read both. I say all this not to sound self-aggrandizing, but to observe that as I was writing my novel, all those years of having read and tucked away seemingly trivial factual information proved to be a great benefit, for I had access to information about gene cloning, for example, that I could use to make sure my novel had factual verisimilitude.
Today, the Internet and search engines have made it much easier to find and review and gather trivial factual information, information that may help you assure verisimilitude when you write. Websites like StumbleUpon.com and Refdesk.com and Wikipedia.org all contain a treasure trove of readily available information, just waiting for you to surf it and digest it.
Sure, I like reading fiction, and I do read it. I like Ray Bradbury short stories, and I enjoy novels by Stephen King. But in terms of preparing oneself to write great fiction, I have found, like the protagonist in Slumdog Millionaire, that having access to abundant factual knowledge helps you be prepared and helps you as an author to write fiction that resonates with truth. Sure, you can just wait until you need a piece of information and then go Google it, but it is far faster and easier to have studied that information before you need it so your brain can just access it and fold it into the plot as you need it. Become a student of a wide variety of nonfiction, and your fiction writing will improve as a result.
Contact Bradlee at [email protected], or check out his book at one of the above links.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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