Reading and writing

For years now, I’ve considered reading to be an aspect of writing, as connected to my ability to write as inhaling is related to exhaling. Just as I cannot breathe out before I breathe in, I cannot write unless there is some reading to back it up. This is true even though I believe in my own self-sufficiency. I could not have become effective as a writer if I had not read voraciously.

Though writing has always been my greatest pleasure, I have occasionally been able to gain as much pleasure from reading as from creating my own texts. I knew that feeling as long ago as the age of ten or eleven, when I first skimmed Thoreau’s Walden in my father’s library. I began to recognize the magic in the words as far more than just a recognition of new ideas and descriptions. It was replaced by the conviction that I was reaching across the years and the miles to touch another human being who was had been waiting to talk to me.

That feeling has never left me. Ever since, I have viewed reading and writing as a dialogue. I have filled the margins of books with comments I wished I could have addressed to the writer – a running commentary from the sometimes ignorant, sometimes merely uninitiated me, an effort to relate words on the page to my own inchoate experiences and feelings and opinions.

From the time I was very young, everybody who knew me also knew that I thought of myself as a writer. Yet, at first, I did not have a strong sense of what that implied. Only later did I run across the well-known but overly simplistic definition of a writer as somebody who writes – presumably in contrast to everybody else, who does not.

The problem with that definition is that it leaves reading out of the equation. Very early in the game, a niece asked me what it would take to become a writer. I told her to surround herself with models, to read the best writing she could, so that she could learn the difference instinctively. Once she had read widely, I said, she would know what writing was all about.

I myself was getting more ambiguous advice. After an undergraduate essay of mine was published in a university newsletter, I took it to the head of the creative writing program and asked him how I might become an even better writer. He gave my essay a quick look – too quick, I thought, to give it a fair reading – then, in a tone I have come to identify with shills and con-men, he said “This essay is a good reason why you should become an English major.” But if there was a reason, it remained a mystery to me. He didn’t say that my essay showed promise or that it was too vague or that I was so far from having talent that I could only come to understand the nature of real writing if I studied in his program. In any case, he offered no apparent encouragement, and I focused on philosophy.

But I discovered that written words could do far more than nudge me into a quiet conversation with dead authors when I was blindsided by the stories of DH Lawrence for the first time. I was overwhelmed by their unique explosive power – amazed that literary works could move me even before I had thought about them. They motivated me to move away from the study of philosophy and persuaded me to explore what it was about words on a page that could instantly fire up my insides and change me forever.

Another aesthetic thrill awaited me as a graduate student in the novels of William Faulkner. Coming to them without any appreciation for the importance of structure in literature, I was struck by the architectonics of literature – years before I knew the word.

For writers there is also a flipside to reading because an encounter with great talent can be as discouraging as it is stimulating. The last time I returned to the stories of Flannery O’Connor, I was so impressed by the style, the plots, the characters – in short, by everything that makes them memorable – that I stopped writing for months, deterred by the impossibility of matching anything I had read.

This illustrates the potential danger that lurks in great literature for writers who are serious about their craft. Reading poses a risk for the ego of a writer and threatens the fragile sense of value that must be maintained by anybody who sends a message out into the world. What keeps me going is the realization that the words I have shaped appear as never before in the history of the world, and that whoever reads my messages has never seen them expressed in the same way before.

Besides, as anybody who loves reading will appreciate, I simply love writing.