A/N: This was an essay I wrote as part of an application to a creative writing course. I thought I’d post it here just in case anybody needs an example of the kind of things you can say if you’re in the same position. Also, it’s a pretty good insight into me. 🙂

As a child, like most children, I read voraciously. As a teenager, like most teenagers, I read scantly. With my time taken up by things I considered far more important than books, I became incredibly critical, reading only novels that I now realise utilised techniques that set them apart from what I thought the ‘all-too-popular’ dystopian fare so common in the mid-2010s. One such book, which remains the standard to which I compare novels when deciding whether they’re worth my time, was The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. From the first sentence, “The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say,” with its atypical (incorrect) spellings and grammar, it was clear that Ness was willing to bend the rules beaten into new writers, as I was at that time, for the sake of character and tone. (Ness, 2008, p.1) I could attempt to explain why unconventional choices like these were and are an immediate signifier that I am more likely to enjoy a book, but I feel Reeter Skeeter, Harry Potter’s journalistic nemesis, does it best when she says, ‘Our readers love a rebel.’ (Rowling, 2014, p.300) 

During my history degree, this love for those willing to go against convention became more literal, and I selected stories that detailed non-fictional, historical tales of the disillusioned or outright dissenting. This habit was reinforced by the requirements of completing a degree; you have to read writing that you don’t enjoy. After being forced through various Victorian tomes detailing manners and etiquette for the sake of essays, coming back to halls to indulge in Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane, Mr Nice by Howard Marks, and Women and the Vote by Jad Adams, which had precious little to do with my course syllabus, made reading feel like a small act of defiance (and healthy procrastination). This is despite the content of the books displaying all the usual academic traits, proper grammar, correct spelling, sound punctuation, that had made the stories so many of my teenage peers read seem boring. 

The books I read during my degree still inform my love of non-fiction, and the mindful diverting of rules, no matter how small, still reignites the amateur literary critic inside me. I still select books based on how ‘different’ I perceive their first page to be. Though this habit has likely left me missing out on books I would wholly enjoy if I gave them a chance, it has also led me to some of my favourites. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford falls into this category, with its cast of non-fictional characters thrust into beautifully-descriptive being by Spufford’s fictional imaginings of how their stories played out, rendering it the best novel in a genre that contains, from what I’ve read, a grand total of one book. Another is Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson, which not only utilises his characteristically uncharacteristic second-person world-building technique, ‘We’ll call it night…they didn’t have the same view of these things that you do,’ but also features the breaking of Sanderson’s personal rule never to make romance the central focus of his stories. (Sanderson, 2023, p.5)  

I will read books in any genre, though I prefer political history and low fantasy, so long as they have or do something unique. Of course, any writer proud of their work has every right to call their book unique, for it likely contains plots, characters, settings, and arcs that they’ve worked to fish from the depths of their imaginations and carved out on the page. So, let me clarify. I am in the habit of reading unique books, displaying what could be perceived as a lack of care for the form, which, in actuality, betrays a deep understanding and love for it, furthering the struggle for, and sometimes achieving a grasp on that elusive concept so many writers, myself included, work toward; true originality.

Works Cited 

Ness, P. (2008) The Knife of Never Letting Go. New York: Walker Books. 

Rowling, J.K. (2014) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury Children’s Books. 

Sanderson, B. (2023) Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. London: Gollancz, Orion Publishing. 

Works Consulted 

Adams, J. (2014) Women and the Vote: A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Keane, J. (2000) Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts. New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group. 

Marks, H. (2017) Mr Nice. London: Vintage, Penguin Random House. 

Spufford, F. (2010) Red Plenty. London: Faber & Faber.