I think every writer has stories they can point to and say, “That one changed something for me.”
Not necessarily because we want to write like that author. Not because the book was technically perfect. Sometimes, it isn’t even our favorite book. Some stories simply show us that storytelling can work differently than we thought it could. Long before I understood terms like narrative structure, pacing, point of view, or character development, I was learning them by reading. Certain books quietly gave me permission to do things I hadn’t realized I was allowed to do.
These are three of them…
Legend by Marie Lu
It’s okay to let more than one voice tell the story.
I love multiple points of view, and Legend was one of the first books that showed me just how much a story can gain when the reader is allowed inside more than one person’s head.
June and Day understand their world differently: they have different information, different loyalties, different assumptions, and completely different reasons for making the choices they do.
As a reader, you get something neither character has: both sides. That fascinated me as a little eleven-year-old. Sometimes the most interesting conflict isn’t created by one person being right and another being wrong. Sometimes two people can experience the same world, the same relationship, or even the same moment and walk away understanding it completely differently.
One narrator can tell us a story. Two narrators can show us the distance between two truths.
That idea has stayed with me ever since.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
It’s okay if the narrator doesn’t tell us the truth.
Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s okay if the narrator doesn’t know the truth.
An unreliable narrator creates a really interesting relationship between the reader and the person telling the story. We naturally assume that the voice guiding us through a book is someone we can trust. They’re our access point. If they tell us something happened, why wouldn’t we believe them? Until we realize we shouldn’t.
What I loved about We Were Liars was discovering how much information can exist in what a narrator doesn’t tell us.
A missing memory matters. An assumption matters. A detail that seems unimportant can suddenly become incredibly important when you understand what was actually happening. It taught me that a narrator doesn’t need to understand everything for the author to know exactly what they’re doing.
The character and the reader can discover the truth together, and sometimes realizing you’ve been looking at the story incorrectly is part of the story itself.
If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin
It’s okay to take your time.
This one taught me something completely different: A story doesn’t always have to race toward the thing you know is coming. Sometimes, the waiting is the story.
If He Had Been With Me takes its time developing its characters, their relationships, their histories, and all of the tiny moments that make those relationships matter. There are stretches where you might wonder when something is finally going to happen. But that’s exactly why, when it does, you care. The time wasn’t wasted… It was an investment.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me as a writer. There’s a difference between a story moving slowly because it doesn’t know where it’s going and a story moving slowly because it wants you to understand why the destination matters.
Sometimes a character needs to sit in a moment. Sometimes a relationship needs chapters instead of pages. Sometimes the reader needs to live alongside someone before they’re asked to feel something for them.
Not every story benefits from moving quickly; some stories need room to breathe.
The Stories That Give Us Permission
Looking back, I don’t think any of these books sat me down and explicitly taught me how to write; they did something better… They expanded my understanding of what writing could be.
Legend showed me that perspective can become part of the story itself.
We Were Liars showed me that the person telling the story doesn’t always have to understand it.
If He Had Been With Me showed me that taking your time isn’t the same thing as wasting it.
That’s probably one of the greatest things we gain from reading as writers: Every story we encounter adds another possibility. Another structure, another voice, and another way of saying, You can do that, too.
We don’t have to copy the stories that inspire us. We just need them to remind us that there isn’t only one way to tell our own.