The other day I was having a pleasant back-and-forth with another creator here—on Substack—about whether writing a compelling story and being literary have to go together.
Several hours later, halfway through pouring my second afternoon cup of coffee, I had an epiphany about literary reading. Literary—for as black-and-white as the word pretends to be—is also deeply subjective. Let me rephrase: every reader who is also a writer internalizes something different from the literature they read. For one it’s character; for another, the redemption arc, the worldbuilding, the allegory, the foreshadowing, the imagery, the descriptions…
But isn’t it also what delights us in the prose—at the level of word choice, sentence structure, grammar, and syntax?
We can take it a step further. Some writers don’t find “literature” exciting. Instead, they look at reading in terms of genres and eras. The ironic part is that the farther we get from when a good work was written, the more likely we are to see it as a classic—and eventually, literary.
Which brings me to what I've really been circling. All that noticing, all that internalizing—that is the work. Think of a painter. Before they ever touch brush to canvas, they've spent years building a palette—not just the colors, but an eye for what catches the light, a hand for the techniques that put it there. Take that away and they're stalled.
Writers are no different.
This is why every writer, everywhere, gets handed the same piece of advice: read. We nod along like it's a truism—of course, read more, sure—but the reason underneath it is the palette. We can't place words on a page in any compelling way if we haven't first read widely enough to build one of our own—the turns of phrase, the rhythms, the moves other writers made that stopped us cold. Reading is how we stock it. Without it, we're trying to paint without understanding our own sensibilities. And here's the part nobody warns you about: you don't only stock the palette on purpose. Some of it you catch—a phrase, a rhythm, a habit—without ever deciding to. It's contagion.
The Contagions That Infected Me (aka My Colors)
Names: I’m good at character names—something I lifted wholesale from Stephen King, who has some of the most memorable names in the business. A name should say something. It should mean something. I met the idea through King, but it runs deeper than him. An obvious example: Willie Loman—”low man,” the whole of his tragedy folded into two syllables. I understood that character at once—long before I had the critical vocabulary to explain what Arthur Miller was doing.
Dialogue: Then there’s the snap and cadence of Hemingway’s “The Killers”—a spare little story about two hitmen who walk into a diner to kill a man. The dialogue is ugly in places—of its time, and unmistakably so—but that’s exactly what fascinated me back in ninth-grade English. It’s snappy, it’s real, and it belongs wholly to its moment. That’s the lesson that cemented itself in me: dialogue has to be written for its time—and it has to stay a little messy. Real people don’t speak in clean, composed lines; they interrupt, they circle, they trail off. Polish it too smooth and a reader feels the wrongness before they can name it—nobody talks like this—and just like that, they’re pulled out of the story.
Aside: Then there’s the aside to the reader. Tolkien is notorious for stepping out from behind the curtain to address you directly—but the first time it ever tickled me was chapter one of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The book is a fictional memoir, Johnny Rico recounting his own story after the fact, and that confiding, looking-back voice is exactly what lets the narrator lean out and talk to you. He’s describing the shakes he gets before a combat drop, and mentions that the doctors compare it to the trembling of an eager race horse. Heinlein’s response: “I couldn’t say about that; I’ve never been a race horse.” It made the early-teenage version of me laugh out loud—and I was fascinated, because those eleven words felt more directed at me than the entire scene wrapped around them. Good form or bad, I use the aside liberally now (and if this parenthetical is any evidence, I always will).
Em dashes and ellipses: Another lift from Heinlein—and really the same one, worn differently. If the aside is the move, these are the tools that carry it. The em dash is the lean-in, the sharp turn, the second thought crashing the first—the ellipsis is the trail-off, the thing left unsaid so you finish it yourself… I’ve never been able to write without them since.
Ellipses for callbacks: I also use the ellipsis for callbacks—closing out a paragraph, or a whole piece, by circling back to an idea I planted earlier and letting the trailing dots pull it into the room. The move itself I lifted from Lawrence Block, in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit—still my favorite craft book on writing. He does it in a full sentence and lands it on a period, a hard stop. I just swap his period for three dots and trail off instead. Same instinct, slightly different presentation.
Character sarcasm: This one’s Robert B. Parker, and his detective, Spenser. Not always the dialogue—though Spenser gets some of the best lines in crime fiction—but the first-person narration around it. The dry aside Spenser makes to you and never to the room. The thing he notices and doesn’t say. Ask my friends or my coworkers and they’ll tell you I’m sarcastic, contrarian, sometimes annoyingly so… and so are my characters. Where did that come from? Reading every Spenser novel on the shelf in my formative years.
Dystopia, and the broken society: 1984, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Two books that taught me a broken world isn’t a backdrop—it’s pressure. It squeezes the characters until you find out who they really are. And underneath it, always, the two questions that won’t let go: Can it change? Will it change? Those brushstrokes are in nearly everything I write. More than that—they’re why I write what I write. Orwell and Dick didn’t just hand me a setting; they handed me the kinds of stories I can’t stop being drawn to and making.
Style: A Portrait Painted by the Authors Who Stuck
These are just some of what’s shaped my palette. But what interests me more are the authors I devoured that didn’t make the cut. As a teenager, if there was a Dragonlance book, I read it—devoured it. A Shannara book, same. And plenty of others. What did all that reading leave me with? Countless hours of pure pleasure, for one—and I won’t pretend otherwise; those books were a joy. But craft? Style? Nothing I could point to. Nothing except a propensity to overuse adverbs prolifically. (Sorry, Terry Brooks—I had to.)
Except—and here's the joke on me—they did make the cut, didn't they? I just told you they left no mark, then handed you the exact mark they left. The books I'd swear taught me nothing infected me with writing tics—some good, some bad.
And that's the whole point, isn't it? Not that these are lesser writers—they aren't. But it wraps all the way back to where I started. I don't think the lesson is to try to be "literary" when writing. Read widely enough, deeply enough, and it gets into you: a phrase here, a habit there, an obsession you didn't know you'd caught. That's the contagion. Let enough of it in, and what comes out is all of them at once—yet changed, and now unmistakably you.
So—never mind my clickbait title. Strike it. Why? Because it’s too late: the contagion is already in you. You caught it from all the reading that stopped you cold, and that’s the beauty of it. Embracing it, relishing it, practicing it, and making it your own is how you become better—and perhaps, over time, even literary…
Until next week… Read, forge your narrative, and… just write!
~ Jon
Just a Few of My Victims (Works Referenced)
Death of a Salesman — Arthur Miller
“The Killers” — Ernest Hemingway
Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit — Lawrence Block
The Spenser novels — Robert B. Parker
1984 — George Orwell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick
The Dragonlance Chronicles — Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
The Sword of Shannara — Terry Brooks
