Enjoy the story, enjoy the learning

How many books have you read? Funny, as a writer, you will often be asked this. Some writers read so much they cannot find space in their manufacturedly busy day to add words to the new world they left abandoned and floundering, waiting (im?)patiently to be set free on paper or screen. In the life of a seriously productive writer, there is always time for writing. It is reading time that must become the product of your manufactured moments. Manufactured for pleasure or for learning. Proving your superness by reading more books or reading more books by [insert famous author name] than me is fine. Argghhh! Who really cares? I shudder at this push for glory. Not interested. Some persist, as though the number of books they read this morning is a reflection on how good they are as a writer.

An often-quoted record for drinking a litre of beer is 1.3 seconds. Burrrp! There are similar records all over the www for all manner of consumption, including speed reading. I like a beer as well as other drinks, like water. I drink both to enjoy them, not to make them disappear quickly. There are hundreds of drinks for us to enjoy. Thousands of books. Find time to enjoy, to savor, rather than to devour in gluttonous glory.

Soon you’ll want to publish your next book. Reading gives writers many opportunities to gather or erase ideas and guide them to a clearer vision for the presentation of their work. So, with a writer’s eye, take some time to observe how the piece you are reading is presented to you. How do you feel about its various elements? The more common constituents like cover design, interior and exterior font and font size, paragraph style, page headings, chapter headings, paper look and feel, and page size will coalesce to form part of the overall appeal, or not. Your audience will react to the overall textural and visual appeal in similar fashion to the way you do. To a booklover browsing in a store or online, the cover and interior overview should suggest that, at first glance, the book is worth a more in-depth investigation — maybe leading to several pages of your novel being read as a prelude to a buying decision. Yay!

As you read, hopefully you will occasionally feel like taking a breather and dropping some notable discoveries into your ‘These are possibilities’ folder. Small morsels of writing wizardry that you uncover. Inside this folder, carefully catalogue those gems of ideas, accompanied by notes about what drew you to them.

Be aware of both the story, written for your enjoyment, and the underlying passages from which to extract new tools, unintentionally donated from the novelist’s toolbox. Pause along the way to take in the view at those lines you are intrigued by — those cleverly massaged word lattices that produce stunning passages to draw you in. Now we are getting somewhere. What made you slow down to investigate, stopping you from helter skelter tripping merrily on through the pages, oblivious to the skills laid bare before you, scarcely pausing to watch as a heroic rescue unfolds? Was there something that lead you, unsuspecting, into a clever reveal? A characterization that left you dumb-founded with its portral? A simple phrase, well-used? Something else? Were there beautiful structures the author used to do that? Or did you miss it all, trying to add another book read to your tally?

What else might you see in other people's works? Pace, pitch, portrayal of events and people form rich sources of enlightenment if you explore with your mind wide open to possibilities, prepared to receive the smallest scrap. Read to enjoy, read to learn? Yes. Learn from fiction. Not to do so is risk taken only by the most bold or foolhardy.

Some pages will make you laugh, or cry, or cause the hairs to rise on the back of your neck. You have been sucked into the story, having no notion of the magnificent manipulation. How was that done? Was it clever description, sentence mix, conversation, cleverly disguised and missed clues? Discovering these insights may reveal more about writing great tales than reading several volumes committed to teaching you about the art of the author could ever do. Each novel is, in fact, a library of lessons. Do your homework and success becomes more assured. Enjoy the pleasure of reading, not race to ‘The end’.

Let breathlessness come from the rush of the words, not from quick-step page turning.

Delight in reading. Abandon yourself to the pull of writing.

Damon

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