Writers Who Don’t Read

09 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Reading as a Writer

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For over ten years I’ve written posts about the craft of fiction, every other Wednesday, here on this site. I have to believe I have written about the importance of reading at least once before over such a span. But I feel the need to write about this again. For once again I have met a writer who doesn’t read. 

It’s easy to say great writers are great readers. It’s a tidy quip and I’ve heard it often. But here’s the thing—it’s true! It’s not only true, but foundational. In fact, I don’t believe you can be a good writer unless you are an avid reader. Period.

How many great musicians don’t listen to music? How many sculptors don’t go to art museums? Yet, at least once a year I meet a writer who says they aren’t reading. In this most recent case the writer was concerned about executing key aspects of the craft—specifically, ensuring they didn’t overwrite, provide too much description or narrative in their stories. I spoke with them about the power of concrete and concise prose, the contract with the reader, and the beholder’s share. It was then I paused and asked about her reading habits. She said she’s not reading and knows she needs to. I thanked her for self-diagnosing, gave her the names of two novels that I thought would inform her work, and we wrapped up.

As a writer you must be pushing great sentences into your head as often and in as great a quantity as possible. Simply by knocking about in this crazy world, you are reading/hearing a great deal of terrible writing. This is unavoidable. Your writing depends on you growing in the craft. And reading is the primary way to do so.

Because He Deserves a Post

23 Wednesday Feb 2022

Posted by in Writing Life

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I was jealous of Rudy’s freedom to sleep as much as he wished. Even given his repetitive diet and lack of a love life, I offered many times to trade him places. He was unwilling to entertain such an offer. He’d look at me as I pitched the plan, then, as if mocking me, stretch out on the floor when I was done. Who could blame him? I’ve heard it said that dogs are the only creatures permitted to live with their gods. What thinking creature would give that up? He likely thought I was toying with him—the strange riddling humor of deity.

I’ve always favored cats over dogs. We’ve owned both. But the longest any of us has ever had a pet was the fifteen and a half years we had our dog Rudy. Thousands of mornings I began my day by turning on my coffee pot then opening the back door for him. We’d walk across the patio and I’d open the gate into the side yard. He’d trot off into the dewy grass of morning. Back inside, minutes would pass and I’d hear his single, patient bark. I’d open the gate and he’d run ahead of me to the door. I’d give him a treat, fill his water dish, and then he’d then nap under my writing desk as I wrote. 

So this one is for you, Rudy. 

You deserve to have some of the words. So many were made in your presence. 

What Students Teach

09 Wednesday Feb 2022

Posted by in Teaching Creative Writing, Writing Life

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I am deeply thankful for the hospitality that was shown to me last week by the Department of Humanities and the highly engaging faculty at Grace College in Winona Lake, IN. While on campus I had the pleasure of spending time both in classes and one-on-one with writing students. I read their work and spent time in conversation with them. 

Here is what I saw:

  • Writers working in community. Creative work requires much solitude, but it’s finished in community. 
  • Story is implanted in us at birth and flourishes in childhood. If we can hang onto this sense of wonder into young adulthood and beyond, our craft only benefits.
  • Writing is how we process ideas; it is a primary way in which we learn. Story and the making of it benefits the writer as much, if not more than, the reader.
  • Young writers get their start as young readers. Our culture must procure readers. 
  • Young writers learn quickly the ways of the craft. The young mind has the advantage of consuming and assimilating knowledge quickly. In creative work this is as great an advantage as anywhere.

I look forward to the next time I’m afforded the opportunity to spend a couple of days at Grace with these students. My understanding of craft was sharpened and tested. And I am grateful.

On Reading at Morgan

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Teaching Creative Writing, Writing Life

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In Morgan Library, on the campus of Grace College, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent hours among the periodicals, specifically the literary journals. I flipped through the latest issues of Nineteenth Century Literature and Contemporary Literature. I wanted to know how great writing worked. While at first I found insight in the analysis these and others offered, the pursuit became stale. All this analysis. All this effort to wring meaning from the text. I just wanted to know how the story itself worked. How did writing happen? After a couple of trips downstairs to the fiction stacks to look up a novel referenced in a journal, I stayed. 

Many more hours were spent pulling book after book from the shelf. I looked at the last time the book was checked out—you could see this in those days, on a paper card in a paper pocket inside the back cover. Often a decade or more had passed. I read first pages. I learned the authors’ names. I got a taste for what they’d written. I took stacks of books back to my room. And I began to decipher how they did it—this selection and ordering of words into story. I was a Communications major earning a self-directed minor in Story.

On February first and second I’ll be back on the campus of my alma mater for a visit. I will be a visiting writer. I will be guest lecturing in two classes, meeting 1:1 with students, joining the campus writing club—Writer’s Block. The evening of the first, I will be reading from The Confessions of Adam. 

My own novel now stands, as well, in the fiction stacks at Morgan Library.

A Change in Setting Revealed

12 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Life

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In November I experienced A Change in Setting. I packed up my writing space––my table and chair, fifty boxes of books (and their bookcases), a filing cabinet, lamps, framed photos, and writerly what-have-you. As I did so, I didn’t know where I would resume my work. Where I would unpack was a mystery. I loaded all but a couple boxes of books and a messenger bag into a storage unit for several weeks, and waited. 

It is now January and I sit at that same writing table, in that same chair, in a different room.

My new writing space is in an upstairs bedroom off a loft living room. It has a cedar-lined window seat overlooking a quiet residential street. There is a tree just outside the window and past it the roofs of houses. Just beyond the roofs lays the practice range of a local golf course. Opposite my study, also off the loft, is my wife’s craft room, her dedicated space for creative work.

This new writing space isn’t yet set up. In one corner, along one wall, is my standing desk, where I do my day job. The other walls are lined with empty bookshelves. My writing table has been assembled and stands empty in the center of the room. Much organizing and setting of the room lies ahead. The bones of a sense of place lack flesh just yet.

But, the greatest mystery of this new place is in what work will be produced here. What writing will leave this place and go out into the reading world? This is the great unknown. My last writing space saw seventeen years of productivity, including five years of grad school and one novel. I could have predicted none of that. I trust this new space holds as much potential and, Deo volente, as many years. Here’s to what awaits the making.

That Flash of Delight

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

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Writing is a slow-going effort. It’s a solitary and troublesome venture. What keeps a writer coming back to his chair day after day? There are as many motivations as there are writers. Some motivations are pure, some impure. Hopefully no one is seeking personal gain through writing. There are much more efficient paths than this scribbling of words. For most of us, the love of reading drove us to join the ranks of writers—a desire to be both a maker of stories AND a receiver of their gifts.

For this writer, and for others I know, a central joy of the craft is that moment when a realization is made about a work in progress. A connection within the story leaps off the page and you see a facet you’ve never seen before. It’s that moment when you, as your first reader, have a realization about the story and it takes on a life separate from your effort.

Earlier this month while researching and writing about the Passion, I spotted a parallel between the water being made into wine at the wedding in Cana and the moment at the crucifixion when wine is offered from the tip of a spear and moments later that same spear releases water from the side of the dying Messiah. All at once, the Good Friday narrative had another facet and gleamed more brightly than before.

I imagine this is what the detective feels when an unnoticed fact suddenly slips into place and transforms into a clue. Or when a patient reveals a close-held detail and the psychologist finds there was a hole in her understanding the shape of that very reveal. Or when a medical researcher is planning yet another protocol in a long-fought effort to treat a rare disease and spots a thread in the data that has slipped all previous notice.

Writers are not alone. It’s a universal of all crafts, of all pursuits. As it turns out, all of us crave that flash of delight.

My First Reader

15 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Life

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My writing, when first born, is a very ugly baby. Seriously. You don’t see the first draft of anything. If you did you would say, “Mercy, Dave, that is a very ugly baby,” to which I would reply, “I know, this is what I tried to tell you in my 15 December blogpost.” But this doesn’t mean no one sees the ugly babies I produce. (Recognizing I’ve exhausted the metaphor I’ll now move on.) 

I have a first reader, a first editor, a collaborator who sniffs out the rotten and ill-wrought in my writing and ensures that I don’t single-handedly wreak creative havoc. She tells me if something is working and she tells me if it’s not. She knows what bad writing looks like and ensures that whatever leaves my desk––correspondence, reviews, novels, and, yes, blogposts—are of a quality that will avoid both my embarrassment and reader regret.

She has been doing this for twenty years. She’s read more bad writing than an adjunct community college composition professor. And she always does it willingly and thoughtfully. She has turned it into a labor of love. Thank you to my wife, CKM, for her support on and off the page. My work would have self-detonated long, long ago were she not looking over my shoulder. Thank her, dear reader; she is doing you a great deal of good.

The Low Survival Rate of Early Chapters

01 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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My current project imagines itself will one day be a full-length novel. Today it is 3500 words of metawriting (writing about the writing—we’ll call it an outline) and 4000 words of manuscript. Both are, as they should be at this stage of the effort, a wholistic mess. 

The manuscript contains chapter stubs that are trying to keep up with outline (which has run ahead, already in its second draft). A few of these chapters will survive, in one form or another, but most will not. They will morph into each other. Some will split apart. They will be reordered. Others will be cut. New, unforeseen chapters will appear between them. At some point a shape will emerge, the contours of plot will be revealed, and the novel writing will be fully underway. 

If this sounds like a sloppy process with many wasted words, I’ve communicated well. It has been said ten pages of prose must be written for every one finished page of manuscript. In my experience this is spot on. 3000 pages to get to a 300 page novel is about right. When I think back on the first draft of The Confessions of Adam, I’m not at all sure even a sentence of it survived to greet the reader. I can say with certainty that the opening of the novel is altogether different. For all of this, the reader should be grateful. They have missed nothing. The goal is to work until the prose peaks and then stop. The reader takes it from there. We can all be grateful for the low survival rate of early chapters. Our stories are better for it.

A Change in Setting

17 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Writing Life

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My writing table is cleared but for a box of Puffs tissues, a Moleskine calendar, a short stack of books headed for donation, a small notebook, the laptop, and a few papers—one of which is a choral reading Iv’e drafted for Christmas. All my books are in boxes stacked down the hall. The bookshelves stand against the walls all around me and yawn blankly like elderly men who’ve lost their teeth. The walls, which last weekend held art, diplomas, and framed mementos, are bare. Punctured here and there, the shock of their neutral floor to ceiling expanse waxes cold and clinical.

When I turn on my desk lamps the clicks echos in the room, hollow and tinny. The only other furniture is the black printer sitting atop the black two-drawer filing cabinet under the window. The lamp and the unabridged dictionary, these that shared the printer’s side table, have abandoned it. As has the table. The printer sleeps, its home button dimmed and dreaming.

My next study will be different. It will have a character all its own. It will be a different place. It will see different memories. This study has been a good study. It was in here that I typed my first novel. It was in here that I had false starts on a half-dozen more. I retired to this room to browse the shelves countless evenings after a frustrating and stressful day at the office. I paused from my writing to look out across the patio at tomato plants and brewing snowstorms. I sat with my first grandchild at this table while she scribbled in my journal. Pet cats, now gone, have walked across its surface. And an elderly puggle has slept under it.

I suppose this small fourth bedroom, that has been my study, will become again a bedroom. I imagine a child will again sleep in here as my child once did. And this room will become another person’s place, a room from which they too will go out into the world, and a room to which they too will return to be refreshed, rested, revived. I pass this room on to the next inhabitant. It is a good room. May it serve you well.

Waiting, A Writer’s Skill

03 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Life

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There are many skills a writer needs. Many of them are obvious. All can be learned. Some are learned whether one plans to write creatively or not. They are not all needed at the beginning. Many are learned just in time, as the writer recognizes his need for them. This is the nature of learning to do creative work. Primary among these skills is the skill of waiting. While writing and waiting are done in parallel—they’d better be, if one is to achieve a body of work at all—the waiting the writer learns to do is just as present and persistent as the writing; it is a secondary craft. 

There is the waiting as manuscripts are read by beta readers and agents. Then there is the waiting while these same manuscripts are read by publishers—hopefully by several at a time. One’s creative work goes out the door and into this world of necessary critical readers and all the time the writer—still at home writing—has no idea how his work is fairing, whether it is being read or waiting to be read or if word on its future will arrive tomorrow, this week, next month. Or perhaps never. And if one is successful, there is the waiting as a book is created, as others practice and perfect their own literary and creative crafts. Waiting is a skill to be done well and done with intention. Good writing leads to waiting.

It is important to note that a writer does not wait to write. There had better not be waiting for inspiration or waiting for an idea. The writer fails if he waits until he has time to write. For if he does, he is no writer at all. These waitings lead nowhere. They are dead ends.

So, the productive writer waits. He waits after and while he writes. And he learns another skill—not to focus on the waiting, but to focus on the work.