I previously started a list of books that I’ve used for creating the mindset of my current WIP, a contemporary novel about family. Sometimes it is good to ignore life for a while and read (or write) a good book. I found myself in a coffee shop crying over a wonderful book by Kristin Hannah. Though my own manuscript is still in the editing stage, this attempt at my first “full-fledged” book is showing me that I have learned so much about writing in the last five-ish years!
For the graphic novel I’m actively re-writing, I use a few of the same (noted with *), but it has a different feel to it. It includes two different versions of books. One set is for the story itself — teenagers at school and home and then what happens in-between. This leads to the mystery, which focuses on something similar to Sherlock Holmes. Secondly, I am attempting to turn this into a graphic novel, so I’ve done some research for that, too. Some of my highlights are:
Book Format
- The Handmaid’s Tale: Graphic Novel (Atwood)
- * Station Eleven (Mandel)
- Whiteout (Rucka/Lieber)
- Blankets (Thompson)
- NF Words for Pictures (Bendis)
- NF How to Draw and Sell Comic Strips (McKenzie)
- NF Panel One: Comic Book Scripts for Writers (Gertler)
- NF Hand-drawn Halifax (Fitzgerald)
Characters
- NF Outliers (Gladwell)
- Paper Towns (Green)
- The Chosen (Jenkins/Bigcrest/Q/McGuire)
- True Biz (Novic)
- NF The Art of Profiling (Korem)
- Fountains of Silence (Sepetys)
- Wonder (Selznick)
- Stitches (Small)
Writing about Writing
- The Artist’s Way (Cameron)
- NF Bird by Bird (Lamott)
- NF * The Weekend Novelist (Norris)
- NF The War of Art (Pressfield)
- NF How to Read Literature Like a Professor (TBR)
- NF Classic Guide to Better Writing (Fleish)
These aren’t even all the books, and when I started listing them, I wound up with: “Oh, this gave me the idea for this, and then I added this because I read that.” A couple of the books even gave me ideas for those of the other manuscripts I’ve written. I can tell by the time I started this second book that I was no longer writing just to get a good story, but I wanted to get better, to hone my craft.
“Just because someone doesn’t have a paying gig, it doesn’t mean that they’re not working on their craft!”
From movie, “Kate and Leopold”
Before closing, I’d like to highlight Stitches (Small), which I randomly found at one of my favorite used bookstores. While I was browsing, my eyes landed on this book because of the story and I ended up buying it because of the sketches. It looked exactly how I wanted to draw one of my characters in my graphic novel. I could imagine the character jumping off the page. At the time, I was still working on the rough draft of the story, but was tossing the idea around of transforming it into a graphic novel. The drawings in this book showed me what was possible with storytelling through using graphics, and I could tell a serious story using what is normally seen as a comedic format. So the story begins…
We were talking in my writing group about feeling imposter’s syndrome and hesitating with writing because, “Surely, it’s been done before,” or “I can’t write anything today!” or “I don’t want to feel that vulnerable.” But what we can all come away from this is: Everything can be used for inspiration, whether it be a movie, TV show, book, or life. And everything can be crafted to make it personal, something that only we can tell because we have our own unique way of telling it! So keep writing! You never know what might be memorable to another budding author!
Always learning,
Hannah Marie.
