I can still recall, nearly eighteen years ago, a pretty young woman with blue eyes and blonde hair taking my creative writing class who, despite her budding talent as a writer, confessed she did not enjoy reading. “You don’t like to read?” I said. “Then how can you be a writer?” She had stopped me after class and wanted to know my “honest opinion” of her ability. We talked and eventually I asked her what authors she liked to read. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t like to read. All I want to do is write.”
Flash forward almost two decades and her pronouncement still jars me: I don’t like to read. How can this be? It’s like being a musician yet disliking music. Or being a fish but not liking water. Huh? It’s just not possible.
Many years ago, I took a fiction writing class with Monica Wood (http://monicawood.com/), who told us that she considered it her job as a writer to read. She said that she read every day without fail. Indeed! Reading—reading carefully—can be incredibly instructive to one’s own writing. A writer’s job should be to read. The careful reader, of course, can learn a lot about writing by reading. I’ve learned from the greats—Chekov, Fitzgerald, and Flannery O’Connor. Tolstoy. I learned the art of stringing along a sentence by reading Faulkner. I learned how to write tight courtesy Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Poe taught me a lot about imagery and atmosphere. The list goes on.
Some books and stories I’ve read over and over again. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. “Hills Like White Elephants.” “Sonny’s Blues.” No matter how many times I read The Great Gatsby, I notice something new. The book continues to surprise me. Such is the nature of great literature.
Over the years, I’ve amassed a good collection of books. Standing in my home office, I am surrounded by books, mostly fiction but also art books and history books and books about writing. Reading has always given me great satisfaction and comfort. It’s been a source of delight and nourishment and inspiration. It’s helped me see my world, perhaps understand it a little better, and it has helped me connect with my craft, with writing, and that has made all the difference in my life.
I'm not sure I like to read. But I think we have to define the term (and I mean no sophistry here). I was discussing music and literature with a friend of mine recently and he is a READER. We also talked music. He said, well at some point I chose books over music, and I told him I chose music over books, but I work with books. So what do we mean by read? I see books, music, film, tv, buildings, clothes, etc as texts to be read. So I read texts all the time. And I happen to read books all the time, but in terms of pleasure I usually derive more pleasure from music texts and even more bizarre texts like house paint colors. Usually...
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, PopRockPolitics. I suppose there are different "texts" one can read. One certainly has to be an observer of the world to be able to interpret and try to make sense of it. I do think, though, that a person needs to read what we might call "traditional" books (certainly in one's formative writerly years) as well as learn to pay attention to all those other texts to become a "writer."
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine not reading. I love "Sonny's Blues" and the first time I read it, we were going over it in my literature class. My sweet, old professor cried when she read a passage to the class. I always remember her when I reread it.
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