There is No Frigate Like a Book

What Writers Learn from Reading

This month, I’ve been dealing with a bout of Covid (unfortunately, based on my social media feeds, it looks like I’m far from alone). I couldn’t focus enough to watch movies or play video games, but I could, for some reason, read, and I went through books with a hunger. This wasn’t the first time that reading helped me survive something (very) unpleasant. It reminded me of how much I love reading—and how very important reading is for writers.

I think most writers fall in love writing because they fell in love with reading first. Most of us remember that first moment when words became more than words, unfurling inside the mind into something as enormous and wonderful and even slightly frightening as Jack's beanstalk, and with the same power to transport.

That's the frightening part—the power—and also the tremendously beautiful part. It's what every writer, I think, is chasing: the power to transport a reader (and their self!) through language. When I was a kid, my father took me to the library every weekend. I walked from shelf to shelf, pulling out books and opening them into Vs, reading random paragraphs to find which books I wanted to take home. I always knew when I found the right one: the shelves vanished, the library vanished, the entire state of Alabama vanished, and I vanished with them. It was just me and the written word and the world that language made.

It's easy, however—especially if sending out submission after submission, fighting the sting of rejection to get your words out into the world—to get discouraged, to let the rejections overtake you, to lose faith in your own language. Or, at least, that's what happens to me, and it happens far more easily and frequently than I would like to admit. It's easy to forget the small miracle that happens every time a pen hits a page. It's easy to forget that more often than not, the writer isn't the one in control: the words are. When things are going well, a writer's job is more like listening than speaking.

Reading—living, for a few hundred pages or so, in another world through someone’s words—is how I return, again and again, to the sense of awe that made me pick up a pen and start writing. I mean “awe” in the sense of the sublime: amazement, yes, but also fear, and the sense of reverence that comes from wonder and terror. I mean “awe” in the sense of respect of language itself, of how letters and words and sentences build, sometimes seemingly of their own volition.

I wish I could say that when I feel frustrated, I always remember to stop and spend time with books. I wish that it didn’t take something like Covid for me to take the space I need to sit and be quiet and read. I can say that I’ve learned, time and time again, that reading is vital not only to my writing and learning about language, but to who I am at my core. Every time I open a book, I’m back in the library, beautifully untethered from space and time, a book an open bird in my hand. I'm still there, in awe of the words, of the world they make.

Here are two of my favorite writing exercises that involve reading:

1.     Pick a favorite poem or a favorite passage in prose and retype it, word-for-word, space-for-space, exactly as it appears on the page. Take note of any mistakes you make in transcription. Take note of your own instincts as well: any moment when you’re tempted to break a line or start a new sentence before the author does. This exercise allows you to understand a writer’s choices about everything from pacing to punctuation from the inside out, on a granular level. It also helps you to better understand your instincts as a writer. Ask yourself: what would I have done differently, and why?

2.     Pick a poem or a passage in prose that you absolutely hate. Write, in your own words, an imitation that follows the form of the poem or passage as closely as possible. If you’re writing a poem, try to match the syllable count and rhythm of each line, the tone, how the sentences fall grammatically in each line, etc. If you’re writing a passage in prose, try to match the number of words and/or syllables in a sentence, the grammatical structure of each sentence, the narrative structure of each paragraph, etc. I love this exercise because it forces me to engage deeply with language I might otherwise dismiss and to learn more about choices I might not make as a writer – and to think about why another writer might’ve made them. It helps me to focus in on the way a piece works, as though I were examining its structure through a microscope. I once started this exercise with a poem I thought I hated and, by the middle, had fallen completely in love with it.