Another Word:
Reading For Pleasure
I have a friend—more than one of them, really—who complains about having encountered a phenomenon that I personally would consider a fate worse than death. They are always writers, and they complain that “writing has spoiled reading for them.” They’re just too aware of the mistakes, they say. The nuts and bolts are way too obvious. They can only read the very best of the best. And then they sigh wistfully.
I try not to recoil, wide-eyed, from the notion. I’m always a little worried, though, that I’m going to get infected by that attitude. From kindergarten days onward, I’ve always had a book in my hand in one form or another. The Internet didn’t exist when I was a kid, so I read and reread, and that habit has remained with me. Taking a ride on the bus? Shove a paperback book in my purse. Waiting on the phone for an answer? Pick up the closest text and read. Our house drips with books; a multitude more are contained on my Kindle.
Am I able to read every single book I pick up? No. But it’s much more likely that an overall approach to something will drive me away than any question of technique. If the focus is something that I find problematic, I may have some difficulty getting into it, but even there it may be more nuanced than that.
For example, let’s presume an older work where the assumption is that women cannot be spaceship pilots because (insert biological fact that actually doesn’t justify excluding them). I can probably read that with a minimum amount of mental eye-rolling. I may be less able to do so with a book that unrelentingly assumes that women are horrible monsters out to kill the narrator. Although I did manage to make it all the way through Naked Lunch and enjoyed it. More than once.
How do I manage it? Well, I do exactly what I tell my students to do. I read the work once through for pleasure. And then, if I either really loved it or hated it, I go back and figure out why. I have found that one of the great pleasures in life, actually, is taking an astounding piece of writing apart and looking at all the fascinating ways that it works. That doesn’t destroy my pleasure in it at all. In fact, it makes my admiration for the degree of craft that’s been employed even deeper.
Why go back to something that I hated? Because I want to make sure that I don’t do it in my own writing. Is it just a matter of a basic assumption that I don’t agree with? Then maybe I don’t need to look too closely. But what if I can’t exactly say why I didn’t like it? In that case I really do need to go figure out what happened because a mistake that you don’t understand is one that you are likely to make yourself.
In some ways, this is part of reading while female. So many classics presume a male reader that it becomes very easy to move to a position where you’re not just reading the book but watching yourself reading it. Assumptions are dangerous things and one of the hardest things in life to avoid. Grappling with yours is part of the reading experience, or at least should be every once in a while. Your mind needs that kind of exercise.
So often the readings of the good stuff show writers breaking the rules, and doing so with élan and grace. Take the first page of any Stephen King novel and strip out the punctuation. Now go back and try to punctuate it yourself before comparing it with what he actually did. You will notice he moves frequently outside the rules—and that every time he does it, there’s a reason, perhaps the effect it creates, perhaps something else, but it is never random. Never a mistake.
It’s humbling to look at a piece of work and think, I would’ve never thought to do it that way. But it’s also instructive, because now you would think to do it that way. Now you have a new tool that you can use. You should wander through a great book like a kid in a candy store on free sample day, stuffing as much good stuff in your pockets as you can possibly manage. And test them out, even if it’s just in a piece of flash fiction, so you have a sense of how they work when it’s you controlling the mechanism.
This is also why it’s important to be reading current stuff, to see what is happening in the field. Maybe the only way you’ll use it is to react to it. That’s fine. But a writer who doesn’t read is—in my opinion—denying themselves valuable mental input that would help them write better stories.
There is a strand in fantasy and science fiction that sometimes perpetuates a division between the literary and the nonliterary. It’s not a division that I’m fond of because it denies writers a whole wide range of tools and puts them up on a shelf marked “use at your own peril.” The fact of the matter is that good writing is crucial to a great book. The most gripping plot, the most sympathetic character, the snappiest of dialogue? All useless if the story’s not told in a way that lets it get to the reader. Bad writing gets in the way of understanding. Want to write something that matters? This is part of that and it’s not optional.
One of the often repeated maxims is that one must write a million words before you can get good enough to be published. This is not true. Some people write far less. And others may write more. Getting better is a matter of intentional practice. If you play a musical instrument, you may be familiar with this concept. You don’t play the same piece of music over and over again. You find the parts of it that are giving you trouble, and you practice them. You practice them a lot, not to the point where you unconsciously employ them, but to the point where you cannot make a mistake with them.
Are you having trouble with a particular aspect of writing? Then look to the authors who do that thing well. Look to the people that you think of when you think of that aspect, but go further than that and do some exploration. Ask other people who they think does it well. Poke around on the Internet for recommendations. Put some unfamiliar names on your reading list. And then read each piece through once, enjoying the heck out of it, knowing that you will come back later and examine it. You can have your cake and both eat it too, or at least that’s been my experience with this approach. Eat and enjoy. Then go bake some cake of your own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and edits from atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent novel is Hearts of Tabat (Wordfire Press) but 2018 also sees the debut of her writing book Moving From Idea to Finished Draft (Plunkett Press). Information about her online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers (www.kittywumpus.net/blog/academy), along with links to many of her 200+ story publications can be found at her website (www.kittywumpus.net/blog). She has swum with sharks and ridden an elephant, performed the hula at the Locus Awards, danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and is currently serving her second term as the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
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Joel Sommers wrote on March 5th, 2017 at 10:23 am:
I just wanted to thank you for this: "It’s humbling to look at a piece of work and think, I would’ve never thought to do it that way. But it’s also instructive, because now you would think to do it that way. Now you have a new tool that you can use. You should wander through a great book like a kid in a candy store on free sample day, stuffing as much good stuff in your pockets as you can possibly manage. And test them out, even if it’s just in a piece of flash fiction, so you have a sense of how they work when it’s you controlling the mechanism." Very helpful. Also, I love your writing~!
D.A. Xiaolin Spires wrote on August 3rd, 2017 at 4:25 am:
Thank you for the thought-provoking read.
"...I have found that one of the great pleasures in life, actually, is taking an astounding piece of writing apart and looking at all the fascinating ways that it works. That doesn’t destroy my pleasure in it at all. In fact, it makes my admiration for the degree of craft that’s been employed even deeper."
This ode to understanding good writing and "what works" reminds me of a Richard Feynman quote about dissecting/analyzing something aesthetically pleasing, in this case, a flower:
“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard Feynman
Don Tyler wrote on March 9th, 2019 at 2:29 am:
In college, I had to take an emergency English class to graduate final semester, and ended up picking a class with the portentious title, "The Rhetorical Essay." Oh, jeez, I hated English 2 because the instructor was into classic mythology (which eventually held me in good stead, but do NOT ask me to write an essay comparing The Aeneid to The Crying of Lot 49).
So I wasn't expecting much.
Boy, I could not have been more wrong.
The Instructor was a young, bearded associate professor named Scott Rice, who would eventually go onto fame (if not fortune) by starting the Edward Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest in 1982, seeking the worst opening paragraphs across a number of genres each year, all inspired by Bulwer-Lytton's immortal opening sentence, it was a dark and stormy night.
OK. Cut to the chase. I'm sorry, but as Mark Twain said, I sat down to write a brief letter, but I didn't have the time for it, so it is long.
The class was completely unexpected. The basic premise is we'd take 8 hours of class time and forensically deconstruct a page and a half of Hemmingway, DosPssos, James Baldwin... and others lost in the midst of time and mind altering substances. Then, when we had completed that author, the assignment was to write a story in that particular author's style.
Needless to say, it changed everything I knew about reading and writing and finally, a few years later when Gene Wolfe's The book of the New Sun came out, I was all over studying what he was doing on myriad levels read after re-read.
I do read for pleasure. Everything from Two Years Before the Mast to The Malazan Book of the Fallen. But even then, my reptilian writer brain is always asking me, what's he or she doing? is this something we can rip for our style, or just sit back and enjoy because its so different from my material? And if it's different, understand how and why.
Staying current in the genre is also important, as you pointed out and as much as I liked the old Heinlein juveniles like Citizen of the Galaxy, I see WAY to many people on message boards that think Asimov and Clarke are still the pinnacle of SF. I mention someone like China Mieville or Octavia Butler and I get blank stares. To me, that's unhealthy if that's all you do.
As a personal observation, I see many people--myself included--whip through a book or series JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS. There are only a handful of books in my life where I won't re-read, no matter how much I like it because I think it will cheapen the emotional response.
If I see it as redeeming for my work--what to do and, Cat, you're right, what NOT to do, I will often re-read.
Intentional practice. Yes.