Critique Everything

One of the things you need to realize as a writer is that you can't always be nice if you're going to learn. You can't always be what other people view as the good person. This is the easiest way to become a horrible writer. You have to know when you're actually watching or reading, and why this is good, or why this is bad. Or you need to realize that this has got some really cool stuff going on and it's also got some really bad stuff going on. 

You need to be paying attention to what's going on. 

If you tried to read a story and then go back and try to figure out exactly what happened because you've got this really horrible train wreck and you're trying to figure out how all this stuff came together and just went BOOM. And you're trying to basically do this after the fact. It's the only way you're going to find out it's not going to work all that well. There are just going to always be those missing pieces and it's because you weren't paying attention so you missed it completely. 

However, if you were paying attention in the first place, you'd be able to see where the train wrecks are going to happen. You could either figure out how to stop it or decide this is a train wreck ahead of time. Now, this obviously would apply this stuff you don't like; so you definitely want to read a lot of stuff you don't like as you're going to learn a lot from that stuff. You need to tear it apart, figuring out how you can make it better, and how you can save it. 

You need to figure that kind of stuff out. 

But at the same time, you need to realize that when you start reading stuff that you do like you're basically flipping the script a little bit. That is, all of a sudden you're going to try to figure out why all this stuff came together in just the right way and why all this stuff rocked and why you love this stuff. You're going to try to emulate that in your own stuff. 

You see you're going to try to avoid all those other train wrecks, but at the same times, you're going to try to figure out how to create recreate these glorious train wrecks. Yeah, there's a difference between the train wrecks that you try to avoid and then there's the glorious pile ups that you want to cause. Trust me, you're going to want to figure out how to do that. And you can do that if you critique everything.

So, have some fun, be judgmental. It's actually not a bad thing to be if you want to be a better writer.