I feel like I've learned more about the ins and outs of story structure by carefully watching my favorite movies than from reading. I have watched movies with a careful eye to pacing and scene structure (particularly since movies can never tell, they have to show, and still make sense).
It's true you can learn some things from watching movies and television. A very good writer I know says that soap operas are very good for teaching cliffhangers of the type that you use at the end of the chapter to get readers to keep reading, but, with the possible exception of scriptwriting -- nah, even scriptwriting -- I caution anyone against using only movies and TV to learn to write. We're talking about different mediums. How an actor or director reveals mood, setting, character, or conflict is different than how a novelist or short story writer would do the same.
I might make a mental note of a cool technique I run across in a novel I'm reading, or cringe from a mistake which I then realize I've been making in my own writing, but I don't go out of my way to 'study' other people's writing.
It's not so much about studying the writer's writing as it is studying how the story was told, how the writer did it. There's a difference between mechanical technique and story telling technique. The first is about, as you suggested in the beginning, the use of such tools as ellipses and semi-colons. The latter is about the craft of story telling, how to use or bend the rules to accomplish a goal, or how to use the tools to and skills to achieve an effect.
For example, if you were to read both Maxwell's
So Long, See You Tomorrow and Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five, you (generic you), might notice that both authors mix the third person and first person POV's. In
Slaughterhouse Five, whenever the switch is made, it's jarring. I think it's supposed to be. In
So Long, See You Tomorrow, the switch is almost unnoticeable unless you're looking for it.
Why? How did the authors do the same thing and create a different effect? How do the different use of the same technique effect the reader? What does the purpose seem to have been? And, perhaps most importantly, how did they do it? How did they pull it off? What tricks or techniques can you, as a fellow writer, unravel or detect that you might be able to utilize (not copy) in your own work?
My advice would be to stop trying to take notes on other people's work and get to work on your own writing. Assuming you've read on a regular basis for most of your life, you already have the necessary feel for written language.
Not necessarily. I've looked at pictures most of my life, yet if I were to take a snapshot worthy of publication it would be fortuitous. I might know how I want it to look in the end, but I only have the vaguest inkling -- that it has to do with the placement of the subject, shadowing, lighting, and the mysteries of exposure -- to create the picture I want in the end. I definitely don't have the knowledge to refine the picture to make it one that people go: Wow! Look at that. I want to hang that on my wall.
I am, in short, a viewer of art, someone who appreciates the final result, but I don't have the knowledge or skills to create true visual art for myself.
When I first started writing, despite having read hundreds and hundreds of books in the past, my own writing was still unintelligible crap. Nine months of hard, serious practice and studying the craft itself have done more for me than a lifetime of reading. You learn to write by writing.
Of course you have to practice the craft. You can't just watch it or observe it. You have to actively try to apply the techniques you study in order to fully understand how to utilize them and how they do and do not work for you. I've never heard anyone say or suggest otherwise. Reading and studying existing works does not take the place of actually writing, but it does give you something to practice.
Look at it this way, regardless of what you're learning, it's usually taught in a variety of ways:
1) Someone who knows how to do it demonstrates it.
2) You attempt a variety of exercises designed to focus on and instill a greater understanding of how it (whatever it is) works.
3) You actually apply it in practice.
Writing is no different.
Reading helps, but it will only take you a small bit of the way towards becoming a good writer. My mother reads a couple books every week and has for forty years, but she has trouble putting together a decent paragraph in her own words. If reading made you a writer, she should be a thousand times better than me.
There's reading for enjoyment and there's reading for study. They are different things. I just finished reading a book for enjoyment. I looked to technique or how things were done not at all. I just enjoyed the story as a reader. If I were to go back and read the exact same book as a writer studying the technique, I would approach it differently, with a different focus and a different mindset. I would not allow my thinking mind to turn off and so I could just enjoy the story, but I would consciously analyze how the different parts fit together, how the craft was employed, and how things went together.
I'm better than her because I've written 500,000 of my own (mostly crappy) words.
Well, yes, again, practice does help. No one has said or claimed otherwise, but again, you have to know what you're practicing. Sometimes, that takes observing and studying how others have done things.
Writing in order to tell a story is more than the mechanics of it, though. I drive a car and have for years and I know how to add oil to my car, check the various fluid levels, replace the lights, change the tires, hang a replacement bracket for a muffler, and change the battery, but none of this makes me a mechanic, because I don't have the requisite knowledge of what makes a car work. I know when my car doesn't work, and sometimes I even know why, but that's not the same thing as understanding how all the pieces fit together and interact to make a functioning automobile. If I ever wanted to be a mechanic, I'd have to study the craft in order to gain the knowledge and skills that I lack, and I would have to practice in order to gain the confidence and applied expertise before I could actually call myself a mechanic.
