#4 - On the Necessity of Reading
The truest quote I've ever encountered about writing is this:
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Where should you start with your reading? The good news is, when it comes to reading, there are no rules. If you want to learn writing, then you probably are a reader already. Even if you're new to this, you have some idea of what you like or don't--in books, in movies, in music. Do you like love stories? Adventure? Science fiction? Contemplation? Fun facts?
Use your interests to guide your reading. Go to the library, if you're in school or have one nearby. I didn't, for most of my life, so I read the handful of books my best friend had, and asked for them as gifts on my birthday. I didn't read a lot of books until my 19th year because they were out of my reach, but I did read a lot of online stuff--the literature available to us has grown exponentially since the internet became a household thing. There are thousands of online literary magazines, webnovels published one chapter at a time, personal blogs, newsletters, and so on. One can never run out of material to read.
If they take place in your city, go to book fairs. Ask any readers you know to lend you books. Read sample chapters and excerpts available online. If you can't purchase books, give public domain books a try. Some authors like Cory Doctorow release their books for free, while others allow readers to choose how much they pay for the work (such as here on Kadambari, although I don't think I can call myself an author yet).
Read all kinds of stuff--the more you read, the more possibilities you discover, such as essays written as lists, novels told through letters and newspaper clippings, short stories composed of nothing but dialogue.
If you already know, for example, that you want to write a travelogue, then go read travelogues. If you want to write middle-grade fantasy adventures, go read that. Want to be an essayist who write about nature? Go read nature writers.
And read beyond that too--but you don't have to. My reading has varied over the last 12 years. I started with R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books. Then I moved on to The Book Thief, a novel about the second world war narrated by Death and the diary of Anne Frank. Later, depending on what was available in our school library (which was mostly stacked with academic books), I read several old issues of Readers Digest and a few novels about a variety of situations. I don't remember much about them, except that I didn't especially like them a lot. But I read them anyway because it didn't occur to me that I could stop reading a book I wasn't enjoying. I understood much later that there's no obligation; you can give up on a book whenever you like. There are more books in the world than you can read even if you lived forever, so don't hesitate to quit boring books and pick up the ones that you find interesting.
Remember that no one's keeping track of which books you've read and therefore what accolades you deserve for reading the books they think you must read, or what ridicule you deserve for not reading them.
You choose the books you read--what language they're written in, what genre they're in, whether they're eBooks or physical books or audiobooks. It's all reading, and don't let anyone tell you that listening to audiobooks isn't actually reading or that you're less of a reader if you don't read everything on lists with names such as "100 Books Everyone Must Read Before You Die," which mostly consist of authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and bestselling books like Harry Potter. These lists are almost always entirely composed of English works, and sometimes translations of works from ancient European empires, such as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.
The world is a big place and literature exists in abundance beyond the western and English-speaking world. If you know other languages, explore their literature. I'm multilingual and I realised this too late; I wonder sometimes how my writing would have differed had I started reading more stuff in Hindi and Marathi sooner--and whether I would have written in them too. Maybe I'd make a better written in those languages than I do in English.
Read whatever you feel like reading, even when it's not a genre or form you'd like to write in. I've binge-read Brandon Sanderson's hefty fantasy books and loved every second of it, even though I have no intention of writing fantasy books like him. During the lockdowns, no longer a teenager, I discovered some really good YA books and realised that I actually like them. Yet I don't want to write any of my own.
As I said--there are no rules, except that you read.
One common piece of advice given to writers is to read bad books so that you can learn what not to do, just as reading good books teaches you what makes good writing.
I do not like this advice (although of course, you are free to try it, as you are free to try out or ignore everything I've shared so far in this book). Firstly, who gets to define what "good books" and "bad books" are? Many people consider classics to be good books that everyone should read, while romance novels or YA literature is often looked down upon.
I don't believe anyone has the authority to tell you whether the kind of art you like is good or bad. You read the stuff that you like and you use your brains to think about whether you agree or disagree with an author or the events portrayed in a story, and what it means, for example, to read and purchase books by someone who's been accused of racism or sexual misconduct.
We all are capable of thinking for ourselves; don't let anyone decide for you what you should think, though do listen to what they have to say and give it consideration. If you think something in a book is problematic or offensive, then use your writing to explore why. Just know that you don't have to accept what any writer says just because they're saying it confidently and in a book printed by a major publisher. Books are written by people--and we all have biases and make mistakes and can't cover every aspect of a topic in a single book. So pay attention to who the author is and what they tell you.
Secondly, the more you read, the more your brain absorbs the rhythms of a language, to the point that you understand intuitively why you put a comma where you put it, for example, or why you started a new paragraph where you did.
I've never sat down and dissected a blog post or short story in detail to analyse it (I tried once and I remember nothing--what short story it was nor what the analysis told me about good writing). I just read a lot and wrote a lot, with the result that when I sent my stuff to magazines for publications, sometimes they liked what I had written and sometimes they didn't. Even today, I write stuff that I think is the best thing I've written in several months, and then, some days later, I write absolute crap.
You learn writing by reading. You don't have to analyse it. Just read as much as you can, and read whatever you like. I'm writing a book on writing here, but I've only read two such books in twelve years of reading--On Writing by Stephen King and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury; both highly recommended. My writing here--how I begin these essays, how I conclude them, how I talk to you, the reader, has been shaped largely by reading thousands of essays, on all topics, as well as blog posts. The bits where I give anecdotes and suggestions come from craft essays on websites like Literary Hub, while the casual tone comes from reading blog posts by a variety of people. I try to emulate authors like Neil Gaiman, who writes--and responds to even the rudest Tumblr questions--very kindly and gently, always assuming the best about others.
All of this didn't come from taking apart the writing I liked, but from reading and rereading (the latter done naturally, when I find something that's so good that I'm drawn to it again and again).
Finally, if all of this feels too much, consider this simple regimen recommended by one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury:
What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields . . . I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist. . . I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
“Telling the Truth,” The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, 2001