I have never been one to read any particular genre exclusively. I have enjoyed most every genre as a reader. And from each genre, I have learned things about writing. things. I noticed that each genre seems to have an area of expertise. I decided to write a blog topic about it, but I decided an infographic would be more fun, so here it is!
Click to see full-sized image.
You can download the PDF here.
Tia Nevitt 
That’s an interesting way to look at it. I see the advatages of reading widely a little clearer now. {Smile}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
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I like this! I don’t quite buy science fiction *primarily* teaching backstory. Could you explain how you chose that as the takeaway from SF?
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I wanted to explore some of these in a blog post, so this would be a good candidate.
In almost every SF story I’ve read, there is backstory covering how humanity got to the future. Almost no SF stories are true “secondary world” SF, where the fictional human race does not share a common history with ours. Perhaps the most famous example of a “secondary world” SF series is Star Wars. Earth is never mentioned, nor is earth history (although it may be in the many books). So the reader is curious as to how humanity got to this future.
Therefore, I thought SF was a good example of backstory.
Also in SF tech might be explained (although many stories don’t bother) in the same manner as backstory–fed to the reader bit by bit.
So for these two backstory techniques, I thought SF would be a good genre to read to learn about backstory.
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