How Studying Writing Ruined Reading

I just can’t read delicious trashy fiction anymore, dammit!

So there I was three nights into my week in Venice and I was climbing the walls.

I went to Venice in February thinking that the week after Carnival would be as close to off-season as Venice gets. I was wrong but that’s a story for another day.

The story for today is how, after three long nights of having nothing to do, my mission was to find a bookstore that carried English-language books. It wasn’t hard to do; Venice is a tourist town, through and through. I found my salvation: a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex” and, just to be on the safe side, a pulp paperback called “In the Company of the Courtesan”. It was set in Venice!

Now “Middlesex” turned out to be absolute gold.

If you haven’t read it yet I recommend you step away from your screen this instant and go get a copy (No, not from Amazon; go to your nearest bookstore and, just to be a total retro snob, use cash). It’s that good a read. Each night after getting lost repeatedly in the streets of Venice I’d settle in under all my blankets and get lost in Eugenides’ elegantly constructed world.

God, I loved that book.

On the plane ride home I reached for that paperback because, yes, I’d rocketed through “Middlesex” in four nights.

Less than 20 pages into “In the Company of the Courtesan” I was through. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have anything else to read with another six hours in the air. I could see exactly where that story was going and I had no desire to go with it.

I’m the kid who sat on grownups’ laps looking from their moving mouths to the page and back. There was serious magic going on there. Something to do with those funny little black squiggles on the white page. I had to know the secret.

I’m the kid who told her little sister on the first day of kindergarten that she’d come home and read her a book.

I’m the kid who came home from that first day of kindergarten pissed off that all she’d gotten was the lousy letter “A,a”.

Being horse crazy from a very early age I dove into “Black Beauty” in the second grade. I recently checked and the recommended age for reading that little gem is 10 and up. I was 7 and it was hard going but I pushed through. Then I re-read it when I was 11 and was blown away by what a breeze it was.

I discovered the shelf of biographies in my 4th grade classroom and went at it like a termite with glasses. I didn’t care whose life I was reading about. I gobbled up Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Madame Curie, and on and on and on.

Mom belonged to the Doubleday Book Club and never policed my reading habits. I was 12 when I tore into “Stranger in a Strange Land” and there’s a book that altered me in ways I’m still discovering.

From that start I was pretty indiscriminate in my reading. If it had words I was there. Comic books didn’t have enough words. I inhaled words, paragraphs, chapters, books, whole shelves of books.

I did have my limits, however.

In the summer, stuck at Gramudder’s for weeks, all she had were Harlequin Romances. I’m not saying I didn’t read them. I did. But holding my nose. The germ was planted then, I think, because it was there that I began to tire of formulaic stories. There are maybe four major plotlines in those sad little paperbacks with the laughable covers and I quickly figured out all four.

Boring.

The cardinal sin in writing: boring the reader.

The golden rule in writing: surprise yourself, surprise the reader.

As I studied with top writers and survived grueling workshops I finally developed some taste. An ear. I could no longer just voraciously gobble up anything between two covers. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I listened. I paid attention. I wrote a lot of crap. I read a lot of crap but I also read some profoundly great literature.

And then, in Venice, it all hit the note I’d been building towards probably since “Black Beauty”.

Yes, it’s narrowed my reading universe a bit which isn’t a bad thing.

After all it’s not as if there’s any lack of great literature upon which to feast in this world. I’ll never live long enough to read all the brilliant, interesting, beautifully written books lined up in front of me but I’m giving it my best shot.

There’s also no lack of people lining up to read crap. At least they’re reading.

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved

Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication

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