I appeared at a literary festival in Washington DC recently, in which I was scheduled for a Q&A session about writing and new media.
I was, understandably, mad excited altogether. It was my first time in the States, and I so rarely get a chance to read my blog posts aloud, so before my gig I was hippity-hopping around my hotel room, jacked up on coffee and the sound of my own voice. “David Norris,” I intoned, between slurps of complementary instant. “Daay-vid Norrisss” (I was planning on reading one of my posts on David Norris; I don’t invoke him to ward off nerves, or anything).
All of a sudden, it occurred to me that I was bound to be asked who my influences were – my literary influences, those scribes who hacked out the path ahead of me. What other blogs I read, if I was lucky … but more likely, what other authors I read.
This was a problem.
I don’t read.
Oh, I read in the past. I was more paper than child at one stage, either growing out of or into a book, a muddle of stained fingertips and wild notions. I adored the classics (and still do) – Alice In Wonderland, Watership Down, The Brothers Grimm. I read all of Enid Blyton’s school stories (repeatedly) before moving on to YA Lit from the likes of Melvin Burgess and Katherine Paterson and Roberts Cormier and C. O’Brien. I read constantly. I would rather read than hang out with my friends. I would go over favourite passages whilst brushing my teeth. I would read after lights-out, standing by my bedroom door for the landing light (no torch), stalking like Nijinsky back to the leaba when I heard a parent’s footstep in the hall.
But as an adult? No. I don’t read.
This isn’t because I don’t love words and stories. It should be obvious that I do. It’s not because I haven’t found a wordsmith I admire; there have been plenty. I think it might be because I can’t allow myself the time to read. I wonder about writers who can, really. Does it not feel like reading is an undeserved pleasure, that dipping into a novel is an illicit affair with the words of another? Often, when I read, I get a nasty feeling that I’m wasting my precious time and should be putting words onto paper, not peeling them off on behalf of another writer. Like I’m cheating on myself, I suppose. “I could do better,” I tell myself. “Why am I not breaking me arse trying to outdo this bucko?”
Other times it’s as if I no longer have the ability to lose myself in someone else’s work, that being a writer has saddled me with a sort of cold detachment; I can admire the building blocks, the words they’ve chosen and how they’ve slotted them into place, but I can’t fall in love with them. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to distract myself from my own fiction … self-preservation? Maybe I’ll get over it when I’m finished what I’m working on.
Maybe I can only be me in between bouts of being someone else.
I was terribly ashamed of this, all alone in my hotel room. The general consensus – Jesus, the overwhelming consensus – is that a writer has to read to be able to write. Though I felt like I’d finished my apprenticeship and could learn no more from my elders (I’ve got to be writing to hone this skill, not perving on how other people do it), I couldn’t go around saying that. Not at a literary festival. People would think I was mental.
So there I was before my interview, desperately pulling author names out of the ether and trying them on to see who would fit. Whasshisname? Yer Wanno with the allegories? Jesus, what about all those Books Of The Year everyone’s supposed to have read? Maybe they wouldn’t ask at the reading. Maybe I’d get away with it.
I didn’t, of course. “What other writers have influenced you?” is a question bloody obligatory when you’re interviewing a writer. I despairingly replied that I hadn’t read anything that I didn’t write in the longest time, and someone tweeted it, and for a moment I looked like the most egotistical tosspot in the entire northern hemisphere.
A couple of weeks later, something strange and wonderful happened. I blurted the whole sorry confession to one of my Antiroom sisters at The Irish Blog Awards, and she gave me a huge hug and said, “You’ve just made my night.”
“How so?
“Because I don’t read, either.”
And y’know what? She’s a proper writer, too. She does things with words that would make W.B. Yeats blush (can you guess who it is yet?). I felt at once validated and liberated. There was nothing wrong with me, after all! I wasn’t egotistical, or deluded, or a great big fraudulent fake. Like, total yayz.
I used to get annoyed when I saw those Tips For Writers posts on blogs, or writers’ rules memes on Twitter, or quotes from successful authors who knew so much about the game, because there were none that matched what I was up to. They felt condescending and isolating – where’s the sense in barking You’re Doing It Wrong! at people who surely need to work this stuff out for themselves? But that moment I knew for certain that there is no Rule Of Writing that isn’t worth bending, no matter how sacred. I’m not ashamed of not being able to finish someone else’s novel. I’m not ashamed to say that my inspiration comes not from other writers, but from sideways glances, video game parameters, folk lyrics, the fashion crimes of people I see on the street.
I am a writer who doesn’t read. And there’s nothing wrong with me.
(I have to admit that I read an entire Melvin Burgess book on the train home from the Blog Awards, because I’m so rebellious I don’t even play by my own rules. Take that, establishment!)
I believe that your experience is a natural progression. As a child I read a book a day and ruined my eyesight by reading long after ‘ light out’. In writing a biography, I read what is essential: hundreds of academic books and pamphlets. I only read novels when I can’t write or study: on holiday. public holidays, being alone in the house. Then I like what I read to be inconsequental, surprises on the bookshelves of holiday cottages and in Oxfam. In this way I know a lot about a little. But I listen and read reviews at the weekends. However, might you not die a little if you read nothing?
Nope. I’d die if I wasn’t writing. I’m perfectly alive not reading.
Although, let’s face it, it would be next-to-impossible to read nothing at all. There’s the newspapers, blogs, magazine articles, etc, that one reads without really thinking about it every day of the week. I suppose what I’m specifically referring to is reading literary fiction – novels for pleasure. Which many people claim I MUST, if I’m to write myself. Poppycock!
I guess I’m just a giver, man, not a taker.
>> Although, let’s face it, it would be next-to-impossible to read nothing at all. There’s the newspapers, blogs, magazine articles, etc, that one reads without really thinking about it every day of the week. <<
Yes, this! I do despair about people who come into creative writing classes and write but don't read, proudly – their writing is usually appalling. Whereas people often find that they can't read the same kind of stuff that they're working on, particularly fictional stuff, but they still read *something*.
Mind you, don't know how you can do it. I'm far too much of a book junkie to ever imagine being able not reading for pleasure – not sure I'd give up writing before reading but I might.
If you read obsessively as a child, then in a way, you’re still reading. I firmly believe that nothing influences writers so much as what they read in their early, formative years. Maybe those books are still sending shockwaves through you and the end result is coming out in the form of your current work? And mingling with all of the other influences you cite.
You raise a lot of interesting points about how writers read, and about the anxiety that reading can bring, in some situations; but I think your last point is the most important one. Ever writer has to figure out for him or herself what works. There is no such thing as One Rule to Rule Them All.
Did you have lots of fun at the festival?
Ridiculous fun. There’s nothing more validating than being allowed to waffle on about writing.
In a way, talking about writing is the most delicious enemy of writing, because when you’re talking about it, you’re not actually doing it. It’s even more a guilty pleasure than reading!
I know what you mean by childhood favourites shaping the kind of writer you become, and I totally agree with you. I can definitely see how Melvin Burgess has influenced me. Possibly Emily Bronte too, but I hope to knock that out of me at some stage soon.
Shocked! But you’ve made me laugh out loud! I’m so sick of that ‘you must read’ slippy sobriquet as I know plenty of bibliophiles where reading did not help them write one iota. I’ve known others where reading too much turned them into a lit-mimic, their lack of originality: miserable, circumvented. There are no rules, just exceptions. If your imagination is teeming away on its own accord and you’re able to capture the honey from that, f**k the begrudgers and stick to what works. I fall asleep reading, have no concentration and get stressed out….of course it makes me feel deeply guilty on another, but then I remember sitting through an English degree without reading which is hard to do (!) and when I do write, I feel the muse pulling me along on a pony trap, so don’t diss it. The only down side is that our novels will be plotless! You have ‘it’ anyway, whatever ‘it’ is, so keep the fingers dancing the conscience renounced. Just think of all those luscious minutes you didn’t waste reading chick lit and novels by over-confident solicitor’s kids who think they’re hilarious. You’ll get there regardless.
Re: mimicry, I think I pretty much read my way out of that. I can look at stuff I wrote as a teenager and point to my Terry Pratchett story, my Chuck Palahniuk story, my (shudder) Bret Easton Ellis story… but as I read a wider variety of authors, the voice in my head became less coherent, less obviously a take-off of someone else. It had fragments of everything woven into it. And then I had to start writing as myself, or I’d get nothing done.
I suspect the writers who stay as mimics either never read outside of their comfort zone, or they’re just not that interested in improving their writing. Or both.
I loved that! Especially the line “I was more paper than child at one stage, either growing out of or into a book, a muddle of stained fingertips and wild notions.” Once I got over my pen-envy I think I fell in love with you a little bit. *Sigh*
Characters take over, dream images recur, there is no room for anything else.
If I thought it would transform me into a writer as talented and imaginative as you and “mystery Blog Awards Woman”
I’d give up the reading right away. As it is I’m reading a lot less than I used to anyway – life (& the internet) just keeps on getting in the way.
Ah, Gawd. Don’t be at me, now. Yourself and Oonagh are only lovely!
I reckon you can probably always learn something by reading. But the further you are into your reading career, the harder it is to find something valuable, and the more you end up just seeing the nuts and bolts and being completely disinterested. Especially if you’re trying to keep up with the flavour of the moment. Fuck it sure, is what I’m getting at. When you’re cracking out stuff like the line Oonagh quoted, it’s fairly safe to say you’ve done your dues.
But perhaps that’s when it becomes purely pleasurable again – once you start seeing the nuts and bolts and knowing how the writer put the piece together, you’ve gone past the stage where you can be (actively) influenced. So you recognise the skill involved, and take pleasure in that, without being overawed by it and wanting to ape it?
Or perhaps not. I can take great pleasure from beautifully crafted passages, but it doesn’t necessarily draw me into the plot. I have a huge problem finishing William Boyd & John Le Carre novels, even though I recognise that they’re great writers. It’s almost like looking at a great painting, for me. “Oh, innit lovely! Now, let’s go home for the tay.”
I know exactly where you’re coming from, Lisa. I read a hell of a lot, but it’s nonfiction. The only fiction I read is fiction that surprises me, those rare occasions when a writer has done something with words that takes me aback, so that I sit there grinning with pleasure at their originality and inventiveness. Part of it is admiration, because I have been unable to manipulate words myself in a similar fashion, so I try to figure out what it is they’ve done and how I can use their ideas to enhance my own writing. Steve Aylett’s “Bigot Hall” had that effect on me, as did Martin Millar’s “Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation,” but it’s rare that it happens. When you get to *ahem* a certain age, you can gauge fairly quickly how skilled a writer is from the first few pages of their novel and decide at that point whether you’re going to enjoy it.
You sent me Bigot Hall! I don’t think that’s a book to be read: I think it’s a book to be wallowed in. I read loads of passages aloud to whoever was in the house, all the time cackling like a mad yoke.
“I have been unable to manipulate words myself in a similar fashion…”
Maybe years ago, boy. Certainly not now.
*blushes*
I agree about the wallowing, though. Luxuriate, even. Or “delight in.” There’s a surprise to be had on almost every page. And yet it’s also possible to spot where he overstretches himself: The wing of the house in the shape of a jawbone, for instance. That line didn’t work for me, but it only stands out because so much else in the book sparkles.
What about all those Jamie books in the kitchen ? What about Nigel Slater?
Yea Yea!! : )
Much as I love Nigel Slater, I don’t think he qualifies as literary fiction.
I remember reading Toast, and it set my progress with my lactophobia back a good decade.
Thank God. I can now shake off that guilt. It is a pity though, I read more sites like Texts From Last Night and My Life is Average than any Pulitzer Prize nominees…But I suppose a good novel is the treat after wading through all of the online entertainment, right?
A terrific blog. At last someone hAS THE BRAVADO to come out and say it: you don’t have to read to be a writer. I do read but not novels — why invent things when life is so weird and wonderful?! — but I spend morwe time writing: blogs that few read and children’s poetry. I like your style and bravado and have added you to my list of favourites
I remember seeing Terry Pratchett speaking about he only reads non-fiction – has given up on fiction entirely.
I am still baffled by it, though.
Love it – thank God, I thought it was only me and I was kinda ashamed of not reading anywhere near as much as I think I should – especially when my wife and two daughters are often glued to a book.
I put it down to my choice of History and English at college – and yet not reading has not stopped me buying book after book that I some day plan to read!
Like some of the others who have posted comments – I think it would kill me however not to write (hence the start of the blog when I got laid off as a local newspaper editor) – but reading – well I just dip in here and there every now and then.
Things like this blog for instance – which is now on my bookmarked list. You never know – I might even read it sometimes!
I feel exactly the same to be honest, I read night and day as a child but nothing has captured my imagination in quite the same way as Roald Dahl and his Chocolate Factory adventures did.
Although I’m not lucky enough to have discipline to write either so instead I fill my time with facebook, work reports and uncreative writing!
Love it. I am not a writer, I am a reader that writes here and there… I was once asked, what I wanted to do when I grow up. I replied honestly. I want to be a writer. The man, looked down on me, and said — “Dear, do you write everyday?”. I said no, I read everyday. He said, well dear, you cannot be a writer.
I became a lawyer,
I hated it,
I am now a painter,
I still read every day.
but there are no rules
except those to be broken….
Thank you for your blog. It made me smile, it validated my no rules things, particularly the end.
Yes, well, whatever makes your motor run, but I can’t help thinking isn’t it a good thing not everyone thinks this way, or no one would buy books at all.
And if the same notions re fiction vs non-fiction were applied to films, we’d all be watching documentaries at the cinema…
I love fiction best of all. Facts I get from newspapers/ magazines etc: it’s in the fiction that I get the nuances and the soul; it’s in the fiction that I feel the inexplicable human truths behind the facts can be found.
Incidentally, my fella is a successful author and he always has his nose buried in a book, usually a novel. I’m an unsuccessful wannabe author, and so do I. Neither of us trust houses without books.
But again, that’s just funny old me, and my ways…
I love your writing though, Lisa, whether you read or not.
(And you do read! Yay!)
Whatever floats your boat indeed. Different things work for different writers, and what inspires one doesn’t necessarily inspire the other. I have absolutely no problem with writers who read! Not at all! But I do have a problem with the notion that one cannot write unless they read voraciously. These “Rules For Writers” that are all over the internet are just ridiculous. Not all novelists are cut from the same cloth.
I guess, for me, it’s the facts in the newspapers/magazines/documentaries that I launch my own writing from. But again, this only illustrates the different ways we all choose to get to those human truths!
you go lisa
One caveat: The advice usually given to writers is “write about what you know.” I’d reverse that: “Know about what you write.” Doing research is indispensable if you want to genuinely get inside a character’s mind or to create a sense of place.
The problem I have with the “write what you know” commandment is that you end up with five hundred gerzillion novels with novelist protagonists.
Nothing turns me off a book faster than a writer protagonist. Apart from maybe one who makes paper *coughcoughAudreyNiffeneggercough*
Well said, John. For years I assumed (for example) Annie Proulx wrote about what she knew, and that what she happened to know about was the weirder bits of the US and points north and all the kooks and characters within, and all their habits and mores. What is really true is that she *loves* that world (rather than knowing about it natively) and is a relentless researcher.
Chris Morris once said in an interview, something like, that he likes to travel more in ignorance than knowledge.. in context I think he meant, where your need to find out the next thing is what pulls you forward. I love the constant investigative nature of making things.
I’m the complete opposite, I usually have two or three books on the go at all times. I review books at the moment for Arena, read fiction books like they’re going out of fashion (am EAGERLY awaiting Daniel Woodrell’s trilogy) and read non-fiction before bed as I have spent too many night squinting and thinking ‘just one more chapter, oh, just one more then).
Mind you I was much the same as a child and am used to hearing ‘that one always has her nose in a book’- for some reason this displeased my mother, why I cannot say.
I still harbour great intentions of having two or three on the go, and have built a papery fortress on my bedside table to honour said intentions (Flannery O’Connor, Terry Pratchett, Howard Jacobson at the mo). But that’s as far as it ever gets. There are, and I’m not joking here, cobwebs on the books on my bedside table.
I’m glad I could feed your Melvin Burgess habit, McInerney. I used to do that covert reading by the landing light. That and taking insanely long sojourns to the bathroom to read entire chapters. Ah, youth.
I think you might still have Teh Youth thing, Keogh. As do I, a bit, if I’m still reading Burgess and getting funny feelings.
For me I can only learn by reading other writers. I have always been a huge reader and it definitely informs my own writing. Stephen King discusses the point well in his book ‘On Writing’.
I find this baffling: “I think it might be because I can’t allow myself the time to read. I wonder about writers who can, really. Does it not feel like reading is an undeserved pleasure, that dipping into a novel is an illicit affair with the words of another?”
Er, no. It feels like part of the bargain: it feels like pleasure and escapism and you also learn so much from it. Influence is a good thing – it is important to read and be influenced. It spurs you on to be a better writer. I would be nowhere without Annie Proulx, Eavan Boland, Plath etc etc.
When I teach CW and students say they don’t read, my heart falls to my boots. I don’t know how someone can even want to embark on a career as writer who doesn’t love to read the genre in which they hope to write. As far as I’m concerned, you learn the sea by sailing it.
I just wonder if writers who don’t read other writers expect other people to buy and read their books? Presumably they do…
YES! I was at a reading by Anne Enright last year (I was there to hear Mary Gaitskill, and we weren’t told of the substitution till I was nestled in the middle of a row, with no means of escape..) and when asked which writers she enjoyed, or who influenced her, she named Alice Munro but clarified that really, she didn’t have time to read. Far too busy. Judging by the awful story she read out, she might benefit from picking up a few books and checking out the competition. It also felt like a bit of a slap in the face for a theatre full of readers to be told that they were wasting their time, before heading to the lobby to put money in her pocket.. If she’s to be the patron saint of non-readers, I’ll be hiding in the corner with a book, thanks all the same.
To me reading and writing complement each other, and I honestly believe that the act of reading makes better writers, and writing better readers.
So, basically, because you have a problem with Anne Enright (and you wouldn’t be alone on that one), you dismiss my explanation of how reading no longer fits in with my personal creative process?
You have every right to believe that reading and writing complement each other, so long as you only apply this rule to your own work. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else how to get the words in their head down on paper. I can only speak for what works for me.
@Lisa – I’m sorry if that came off as judge-y! I was mostly responding to Nuala’s comment about teaching people who don’t read how to write – and I think she made a valid point. If someone has never been a reader, it makes it much harder to point out the basics of what works and what doesn’t. I really didn’t mean to be dismissive – whatever works, works – and I didn’t mean to sound like I was trying to apply a blanket ban on writing without being a reader. Perhaps I should um.. reread my comments before clicking ‘post’?
(The Anne Enright hate isn’t that strong in me, it’s just that the contrast between her and Gaitskill depressed me.. Was mostly amazed at the New Yorker publishing the story she read out. But, hey – I was one person in a full room and she got a standing ovation, if I recall correctly)
We all have different creative processes and what fits one writer will not necessarily work for the next. Mighty that your process involves reading and learning from other writers. Mine doesn’t. At least, not anymore.
There shouldn’t be a concept of “bargain” involved. One should read because they want to, not because they feel they’re bound by their vocation to bolster the industry.
The implication of learning by reading others is that you are required to read a lot of rubbish, as well as a lot of good writing, in order to work out how to distinguish between good and bad writing. Surely the way to learn how to write is to do lots of writing, not lots of reading. You learn by making mistakes and correcting them. What’s missing from the pages of other writers are all the corrections they’ve made along the way and all the editing that’s been done to the original and revised manuscripts.
I play tennis as a hobby, and much as I love watching Nadal and Federer, I won’t get to their level by watching them play. I have to go out on the court and hit thousands of balls day in, day out. Nadal and Federer provide inspiration and pleasure, but there’s a clear difference between difference between consumption and production.
The more comments I read, the more I think about this issue. The truth is that we learn to speak, by listening and speaking. We learn to be ourselves by observing roles and living around people. The obvious sequitur would be that we learn to write by reading.
Imitation is the basis. Allowing the I, to develop and have its own voice is a process that has to be done after reading… not during. I totally see, why some writers would have a hard time reading. I remember when I was an editor… for a while I could not read without trying to edit. And sometimes, I speak and I catch myself repeating someones theory as my own.
That does not mean I am going to stop listening or reading, in order to have and idea and speak it. But that is me.
I truly believe, that although there are general rules for a majority, there are just as many exceptions. We live in a world of generalizations, abbreviations and rules. The genius lies in the creative, in the rule breaking, in the exception– in science, in math, in art, in literature and in life.
Otherwise, there would be no wheel.
Hi Mae–
Your analogy holds, I think, for the learning of language, but not for creative production. Writers generate new material, otherwise their work is indeed mere imitation, a copy of what’s gone before, and that’s called plagiarism!
The way writers generate new material is by experimentation, by mastering the techniques of writing and then deploying them in original ways. That mastery can’t be acquired by reading any more than the generation of new sentences and self-expression can be acquired by listening to others.
I’d never dissuade anyone from reading, but when a writer already knows their craft, it usually means they are able to distinguish between the works of others that can help them develop and those works that are irrelevant or superfluous to their requirements.
John
Hi back:
I dont think you understood what I was saying, or shall I say I was not clear… What i was trying to say is that while imitation is the pattern or learning, creativity, is about breaking rules, going outside the sequitur….
If I wrote like everyone else, you might have understood me better;)
mae
Just for the record (the lawyer in me) I totally, absolutely agree with Lisa. As a painter, when I am in my creative process, which is quite often… I don’t look at other peoples works. I don’t visit museums and I stay away from openings. I feel it invades my process, and I fear I will copy someone.
I believe in creativity, doing your own thing, your own way. In art as in everything else I value individualism and experimentation. After years of being a voracious reader, or being an art student– the basis is there. Thereafter, you must go out and walk on your own–fall, fail and f–ck it… that is how you find your way, as a person or an artist.
I am sure that the woman who invented the wheel, did just that.
Hi Mae (again)–
Just read (and re-read) your two comments. We agree!
John
yup. Its good to find kindred minds… lots of them here. (smile)
Great post!
I read and I read a lot. But thinking about it I can totally see where you’re coming from. Reading is actually a very passive way to take in the world. Interesting stuff.