May
22
2010
Writing vs. Reading
Author: Sara MuellerAt last year’s World Fantasy Con, I had the good fortune to hear Ken Scholes read his work. One of the questions asked was “What books are you currently reading?” Ken’s reply was that, in his case, writing used the same brain muscles that reading did and since he was deep in a writing process he wasn’t really reading anything at that moment. I was intrigued by that answer, heard the ring of potential Truth there, and started to pay more attention to what I read.
Everyone who’s a writer in a serious way will tell you – if you want to write, you need to read. This is true. When I’m not neck-deep in romancing a manuscript, I read voraciously. Lately, I’m almost always neck-deep in writing, so I’m not as currently well-read as I’d like.
When I’m actively working on a manuscript, I make time to read works by friends (a way big enough pile that I’m always behind anyhow) and sometimes reread favorite books. I can pick up those, read one page, or ten, put the book down and go back on my merry way until I have another ten minutes. If I start up reading a NEW story? Six will get you ten it’s start to finish, baby, and if I get four hours of sleep and feed my family around the edges it’s a great day. I have to block out ‘works by friends’ time, because otherwise not much of my own writing gets done.
Then there’s research fiction I read while writing. It’s usually in the narrow spectrum of what I’m writing. What the hell is research fiction? Well, while I worked on Bone Orchard (written in between surgeries and the nerve condition in my arms/hands), I tended to read books like ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley, and books by Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope. They’re ‘research fiction’. In those cases they were books I’d read before, but I needed to be thoroughly reacquainted with Gothic (in the classical sense) and Victorian writing and I chose books whose tones had commonality with what I was writing.
Then there’s reading for research of facts. For my current project, I read Her Majesty’s Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, which was a fun read, because I find Francis Walsingham in all his type-A hyper-intelligent fanatic Protestant anti-glory to be fascinating. Then there’s some nice light stuff like ‘The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555 – 1608‘. ‘Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England‘. ‘The Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century‘. Sometimes research reading is Really. Not. Interesting. Unless you’re me, and sometimes not riveting even if you are me; and if you are, would you fold that load of laundry? Thanks. Four books here, out of about three dozen quite dense historical reference works and I’m trying to get hold of more even as I move forward in my writing this manuscript.
For me, it’s not necessarily about how many cycles I have to devote to reading vs. writing. Quite a lot more sharply it seems to be reading time vs. writing time. If you don’t read, you probably won’t learn to write really well. If you don’t do the keyboard time, you don’t get anything written. The time I spend reading, I’m most often reading toward my writing.
Writing vs. Reading. If you do both, how much of each?