Reading: The Creative Center

In On Writing (p. 147), Stephen King says "Reading is the creative center of a writer's life."

We develop our ear for language through reading. We learn the craft of writing - how stories are put together, what works, what doesn't, how much description we like, what makes a character come alive.

As a kid, I spent entire summers in a tree reading. I had full access to my grandfather's sets of O'Henry, Dickens, and other writers from that era. My adult siblings left collections by Serling and Hitchock lying about, and Mom's historical romance novels were fair game as well. And of course there was the library.

As a college student, I had to read texts and other material - thousands of pages every week - and still worked in an occasional novel for relief. As a working mother on my own with three challenging children... well, it got a little harder. They did provide me with a lot of material, but I looked forward to our camping trips because I'd grab a stack of paperbacks at the grocery store and read them by the fire at night once the exhausted kids were quiet in the tent.

I am probably a little OCD. My kids knew, if Mom's reading a book, leave her alone unless it's a crisis. I finished all 849 pages of 11/22/63 in one weekend - and I read every word. I just didn't stop except for essential breaks. (The kids were grown and I was living alone - made it easier.) I like to stay in the story through the end.

It's not always possible to do that. However, I almost always have my phone with me - which means I have full access to the world of literature via my library app. Whenever I have to wait, instead of being impatient about wasted time, I open my phone and read that book I want to finish.

So, if you're serious about writing, read. If you're busy, use those scraps of time and know you are feeding your creative center.

Listen to the Beat

As a young child, I routinely took home a foot-high stack of library books, read them, and returned for a new stack the next week. I was writing A+ stories long before a teacher showed us how to diagram a sentence. I still read and write - but I don't diagram sentences. I write according to the sound, the flow, the feel of the words. If a fragment works better than a grammatically correct sentence, I use the fragment. I use paragraph breaks the same way - according to what fits the flow of language.

Some people are fanatical about every sentence being grammatically correct and/or any of a wide range of rules someone has told them are essential to good writing. So, as I read Stephen King's On Writing, I was very happy he says (on p. 134) that "Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes" - that the author hears the beat as they write and that determines where to start a new paragraph and when to use a fragment. He explains that "beat is part of the genetic hardwiring...but it's also the result of the thousands of hours that writer has spent composing, and the tens of thousands of hours he/she may have spent reading the compositions of others."

Read that one more time - make sure you've put in those hours of reading and writing. Once you have, trust your ear and listen to the beat as you write.

Find Your Joy

The next few blogs, I'm going to pull out quotes from Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and talk about them a bit. I've heard people say they don't read him because they don't like "that stuff" - but if you are serious about writing, read the blurbs and choose some of his novels to read - to learn from his command of the craft.

"If there's no joy in it, it's just no good. It's best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher." (page 50) At a pitchfest, I encountered a successful screenwriter who told me he hated writing, but it was just so easy to make a lot of money doing it... Maybe he started out enjoying it and "got lucky" enough to land a spot spewing out garbage.

I'd rather find joy in what I do.

Every so often, I question why I am writing - is it because my mother groomed me to be the writer she wanted to be? I have so many other interests and there isn't time to do everything. While I don't remember not making up stories and I know I attempted my first novel at age ten, I also remember completing a test for an art course at about the same age, spending my allowance on rolls of film and developing, and begging for piano lessons when I was four. I knew how to read English and music before I started school. I was a music major for a bit in college. Should I move away from writing and go on to music? There are professional musicians on all sides of my family.

Then King talks about time. When I was taking piano lessons, I usually practiced the minimal fifteen minutes a day. I may want to make more time for music, but most likely I'll keep it at a hobby level. As for art and photography, I've taken college courses in both. My artistic talents have found an outlet working on sets, designing my homes and incidentals, and designing books as a self-publisher.

But writing is my strongest skill; communication is my deepest talent. When I start writing, time does not exist. I pulled my first all-nighter writing a fifth-grade report! There's joy when I find the perfect phrase; there's joy when my characters make me laugh out loud as they write the story for me; there's joy when a reader lets me know my work touched them; there's joy when a work gets recognition; there's joy when I've helped someone's life through a court report.

Whatever you're doing, does it bring you joy? If not, move on. Find your joy.