I sometimes run across people who don't read. Quite a few, in fact. The Internet moved a lot of readers almost entirely online, or people who think they're readers. I usually pat them on the head with pity, in my mind, and wonder what they do with all that wasted imagination, even though it's not a very nice thing to admit. I don't envy them, for sure.
Sometimes, I even run across writers...who don't read.
Those are the ones I really struggle to understand, and I don't do very well, truth be told.
How do you write without reading? Where does that desire even come from? Without reading in the genre you're writing from? Where do you get the language, the conventions, the cliches?
My family taught me to read before I ever went to school - my grandmother and my brother did. Read myself bedtime stories with no one else would.
I never read for school - I read around school.
I procrastinated homework in elementary school through high school by reading. I haunted my local public libraries...would have slept there if they'd let me. When I got to college, I procrastinated doing my biology and math homework by writing my own novel on the side.
When I had the option to write a report based on a new book, or to rework and turn in a previous book report done last year, there was no question.
I read a new book.
Once, I read the same book three years in a row, and wrote a brand new report about each one. (In case you're wondering, that particular book was A Separate Peace - a novel that echoed my own adolescence.)
If a movie based on a book comes out that I want to see, there was no question. I read the book first. Or later, and then think to myself, "I would have enjoyed that movie so much more if only..."
Call me a masochist, but there it is. And I'm not alone either.
C.S. Lewis took the words right outta me mouth when he said...
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