Craft Notes
Is Reading Really the Most Important Thing?
I have been really enjoying the interesting and insightful blog posts being written by the editors of Uncanny Valley. In a recent post, frequent HTMLGIANT commenter and Uncanny Valley co-editor Mike Meginnis offered notes on teaching an introductory creative writing class. He says really smart, practical things about teaching creative writing but I’ve been mulling over his first note quite a bit. He says, “1. Intro to CW should be more about ways of reading than ways of writing.” The more I think about this statement, the more I wonder if we rely too heavily on the notion that the best writers are the best readers. I think we offer this kind of advice more out of reflex than anything else. Hear me out. There is ample evidence that to write well, one must read well. Reading and learning how to read critically, exposes us to different writing styles, voices, and techniques. We can study styles we want to emulate. We can be challenged. We can see examples of how we want not to write. I cannot deny that some of my best writing instruction has come from reading everything I can get my hands on.
That said, I firmly believe while reading is important, it is not more important than writing and increasingly I worry we are sacrificing the practice of writing for young writers at the altar of reading. Without fail, almost every writer who is asked about what writers need to do to improve their craft states, first and foremost, that writers need to read. I’ve stated this myself, quite a few times, but either we’re teaching writing or we’re teaching reading and to have a creative writing class where writing is not foregrounded gets me thinking. Why isn’t it writing that is most important? Why don’t we say that to be a great writer, you need to, well, write?
My very first writing teacher was a man named Rex McGuinn, a poet who taught English at my high school. He he loved teaching and he loved writing and words. I don’t remember most of my teachers but I still remember Mr. McGuinn. On the first day of class he told us that to become good writers we needed, more than anything, to write. He insisted we write every day. Lots of writing teachers impart the importance of writing every day but Rex McGuinn was the first writer and teacher to tell me that. He was so supportive of our youthful writing and he was supportive of me, in particular. He told me I was going to be a great writer someday, before I could even dream of thinking of myself as a writer. I have no idea what he saw in me at fourteen because my writing back then was as ridiculous as you might expect it to be, but he saw something and he nurtured it by encouraging me to write, write and then write some more. Even though I took his class a long time ago, on days when I am feeling lazy, I think of Mr. McGuinn reminding me to write every day and because sadly, he passed away at quite a young age, I also feel like maybe he’s watching me and clucking his tongue if I don’t write every day. If I had to trace the genealogy of why I believe writing is as important as reading for young writers, it would begin with my sophomore English teacher.
The importance of writing itself cannot be discounted even and perhaps especially for beginning writers. On the first day of class, regardless of the type of writing I’m teaching, I tell my students that while we’ll be doing lots of different things throughout the semester including reading and developing critical awareness, what we’re going to do most is write—we’r going to write a great deal. There are often groans when students hear this and they begin to offer up all the reasons why they will not be able to write a lot or why they are bad writers or why they hate writing and those attitudes are precisely why I prioritize the very act of writing in my classes. So often, writing intimidates students, particularly freshmen and sophomores. The sooner they realize they have no choice but to write, the sooner they can feel more at ease with the writing process, at least in theory. Most of the time, this theory bears out.
The quality of writing may not always be “good” but at least students are developing that writing muscle and getting into the practice of writing for an audience, or an assignment/task, or for themselves. Students may never write again when they leave my class but for a few months, writing is the priority. I hate to make a cheesy analogy but learning to write is very much like getting in shape–in the beginning, you’re going to be miserable and out of shape and making a mess of things but eventually, you develop stamina and your body adapts and you’re more capable. How can students develop that muscle, that stamina, that capability when reading and not writing is the priority? Meginnis says, “There are essentially two goals in an intro class: waking students up to the possibility that they might enjoy writing, and teaching them a critical vocabulary through which they might become better readers in their own lives and, potentially, in future (workshop-oriented) classes.” I’m not sure it’s my job to teach students how to read and I don’t know if I care whether or not they enjoy writing. I talk about what it means to read critically and what students should look for in texts. I hope they enjoy writing but that’s such a personal preference and I’m not a salesperson beyond bringing a great deal of enthusiasm for writing to the classroom each day. If those are the two goals of a intro class, where is the place for putting one foot in front of the other and teaching students what it means to actually put a story (or any kind of writing for that matter) together? An intro class should have one goal–to teach students to write–it is how we achieve that goal that is subjective. Teaching students to read and introducing them to the possibility that writing might be enjoyable are practices that should function in service of the primary goal of writing, writing, writing. I believe in teaching students to put a word on the page and then another and then another until those words start to become something more.
What would (or do) you prioritize in introductory writing classes? Is reading the most important thing for the growth of a great writer?
PS: Why Don Draper? Don Draper is delightful and delicious and he knows how to sit so well. He is real.
Tags: creative writing pedagogy, Mad Men, Uncanny Valley
I don’t think one needs to have read a lot to write well, by any means. But I am also amazed at how poorly read most “writers” are. And often enough it shows up in their poems, or stories or whatever.
I honestly do think it is the most important thing. I think more people interested in writing should write much less (or not at all, if need be) and read a whole bunch. Of course, as I’m learning, that’s a hard pill to swallow when so much of your identity is tied up in the word “writer.” There is this feeling that one must get work out now, right now, you must publish a whole lot of shit RIGHT NOW, before you’re thirty, before you’re forty, before–gasp!–your friends first publish their work.
But really that’s just a bunch of BS, all tied up in different forms of self-justification. At least for me. I’m trying to learn to slow down and be patient, to wait for poetry.
Milton believed that those who read and study hard and stay disciplined are those who the Muse most willingly descends upon. I think he was probably right.
And I think it’s most important mainly because it alters and enhances one’s ability to perceive, not necessarily because it makes one all that much more masterful with the language, or whatever.
I agree. Thinking is what good writing is all about, not the mechanical act.
I don’t think many people would claim that reading is more important than writing for any writer, but it may be more important for YOUNG writers.
In most fields it is assumed you should study the masters/research/etc. until you have a fair understanding of the field before completely diving into practicing said field. Why not with art or writing?
Can you amplify this? How does it show up? Also, these two statements seem a tad contradictory.
BAD WRITING
Both are important, but I’m in the reading is more important camp, simply because too many writers are in a rush (to echo Ryan) and unambitious. The pressure to publish at an earlier age defeats the purpose of “writing a lot” since many writers will publish anything they write. Ambition and a desire for originality, which can only be achieved after years of reading widely and figuring out what’s been done before, are trumped by the desire to write a merely competent story (re: “publishable”).
I admire a writer like Marilynne Robinson who takes her time and reads widely and deeply, and not just fiction.
ZZZZZIPPP WRITES MORE WHEN ZZZZIPPP READS MORE. EZZPECIALLY WHEN THE WORK READ IS NEW OR CHALLENGING TO THE WAY ZZZZIPP WAS READING BEFORE. (THAT DOESN’T MEAN ONLY READ “AVANT GARDE” WORK, ONLY TO SWITCH IT UP EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE).
READING IS A WAY OF THINKING.
YES YES YES
(DIDN’T SEE THIS).
I mean there are a few writers who don’t seem that well read, but are clearly geniuses. A writer like Baron Corvo falls into this category. Generally though, most great writers are also very well read.
It shows up in a shallowness of image. In scenes that hold no depth, emotional or otherwise. In hackneyed phrases and a lack of understand of how certain word combinations are correctly used.
One poet I know, who has a good many books published, has one prizes and so forth. He has never read Homer. In conversation:
Poet: “It is like Plato…”
Me: “You like Plato?”
Poet: “I have never read him, but did read something by his student Socrates.”
Me: “You mean Aristotle?”
Poet: “Aristotle?”
This same fellow wrote extensively on Chinese classics, including well known textbooks for schools, but of the 4 major novels in Chinese, he had only read one.
won prizes…cough.
THAT POET HAS NEVER SEEN THE MOON.
I also think that for beginning writers it is much more important for them to experiment, do exercises, write under constraint, imitate writers they hadn’t previously heard of and otherwise be forced to do new writing and not try to complete the novel they started in 10th grade. (They don’t seem to realize that you wouldn’t really want to have that stuff published). Most young writers seem to already be stuck in a rut and already have any idea what kind of writing they want to do and what kind of writer they are. That’s something that needs to be broken down quickly by getting them to read and write new things.
OR IS IT THE SUN? THE MOON IS ON ZZZIPP’S MIND RIGHT NOW.
After the beginning stages though it flips and writing is the far more important side of the equation.
Maybe that’s why a lot of writers run out of things to say–they think they can just coast after reading a few Alice Munro and Ray Carver stories.
Obviously, it’s never an either/or. I just think it’s more helpful to emphasize the reading part since it’s assumed that writers write.
Bad assumption in my experience!
I’m going to firmly place myself in the ‘write more’ camp. I read everyday, intensely. I listen to audiobooks in the car, to and from work. But lately, I’ve been finding less and less time to write. I write more cover letters and emails than fiction, or even journaling. My writing has suffered since I graduated, when I had nearly infinite time to write.
it’s like, you don’t get better at skateboarding by sitting around watching videos or hanging around a skatepark. You have to get out there and take some spills and keep doing it. Practice. Sprain an ankle. Jump down a flight of stairs a hundred times before you nail it.
Most of the people who take the time to frequent blogs like this probably don’t fall into the category you’re referring to here.
Don’t you just want to slap Dick W’s face? I know he’d like it.
physical activities require physical practice to get your muscle memory in shape, but reading helps your “writing muscles” and is practice in a way that watching skate videos isn’t for skaters.
This is a v good post, Roxane, thank you. I’d make the argument that it’s not how widely you read, as a writer of any season, but HOW you read. Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion. (And yes, I’ve stolen that from Wilde, or appropriated it at least.) It’s a completely different mode of reading. Most students who want to write are accustomed to school spaces where you’re taught to read as a lens for analysis. To read to steal requires perhaps even more discernment and criticality than mere analysis. This is what I teach when I teach creative writing. I teach my students how to steal and how to read. Yes, of course, writing is important, but writing does not appear from ether, you know? I’d argue, for a young writer, reading is more important, if only in terms of exposure to ideas. So often, a student will come to me with an epiphany of an idea, and sadly, I know it’s been done, again and again before, so I point her to those texts as examples, places to start, points of departure. And finally, yes, Don Draper.
Yes good points. Writing doesn’t appear from the ether, so if young writers aren’t reading widely their writing is probably appearing from blogs, Twilight fan fiction and Cliff Notes of books in high school that they couldn’t find a film version of…
“Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion.”
That’s it, in a nutshell.
I will tell you the tough thing, though. I can barely get through one novel without feeling another one blasting around in my skull. That’s probably true for most of us so maybe I should complain more that I don’t have the willpower, often, to resist just starting the damn thing.
Yeah. I personally think there’s a certain level where the distinction between writing and reading basically erodes, but I’m not sure I can elucidate that very well.
“The more we read, the less we write.” —Nicanor Parra
I agree. If I were to look at stuff I produced ten years ago, its greatest flaws would probably be in an ignorance of both 1) the ideas and techniques that have been used, both well and terribly, before, and 2) the possibilities that I wasn’t even aware of because I hadn’t read the right books yet.
Reading is inhaling; writing is exhaling…we either implode or explode.
“Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion.”
I think they should read to be stolen from.
I like this way of putting it. . . actually I like it a lot. . . although I would add that one can exhale in ways other than writing.
Don’t think I really agree with that. Generally, I think, we write more the more we read. We may not put as many words to paper, but we do write more. Our batting average goes up.
It’s spooky, of course, to wonder also about what I’m missing now. Probably the thing that was most valuable to me in grad school was the reading lists.
Thank you Brendan. ‘Won’ and ‘one’ do sound alike.
After years and years, I still feel like a beginning writer with mistakes aplenty.
The best way to charge up is to read and read and re-read and re-read. Going through a James Salter story dozens of times, ‘Twenty minutes,’ marking it up, watching the curves, the slide of feeling – the story and the way of the story seems to get transmitted to me, implanted say, like an actor knowing his lines – and to speak on that, reading Shakespeare, King Lear over and over again, the language becomes you. You become the characters because you come to know some of those treasured lines like, “The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” IV.1 Edgar
I think we’ve all heard those stories of someone like ee cummings saying, You have to read Hamlet ten times. Maybe not ten, but I think we know what he means.
I’m with Lincoln and Tim here. Reading insatiably is important for young writers. When we get students in our intro classes, they often just haven’t read enough. That leads to poor workshops where people in the room don’t have a common vocabulary of stories (JCO, Carver, DFW, Barthelme, Baldwin, Kincaid, etc. etc.). It’s our job to begin forming that common language. Also, young writers are often too affected by narrative devices they see on TV and movies that rarely work well in prose fiction. Writing every day is really important but if all you’ve read is Dragonball Z fanfiction, your prose is never going to get exponetially better. Exposure to different types of fiction is vital.
Agreed. I’m not saying “don’t read,” just write more. There’s an article somewhere about Bill Watterson, who says something about painting like, make 500 paintings and throw them away. Then you can actually start painting. Writing should be like that too.
I disagree with that actually. The more I read the more I write.
I think the emphasis on reading over writing in recent years is due in large part to the current culture of self-expression in which everyone is writing a memoir and considers him/herself a writer, while the publishing industry is dying and we seem to be losing readers (at least of long form literary work) at a very high rate. I often think of writing as a conversation between the author and every other author that person has ever read. The solipsistic i-memoir cult of writing seems to indicate this transition away from readers. The conversations feel increasingly one-sided.
i also think there’s a bit of a tendency to set up very expansive hierarchies. To be “well-read” or even sufficiently so, based on the teacher or writer’s specific preference, involves skads of books – more books than it would be reasonable to tell a young writer to read. I think it’s an intimidating thing to enter a creative space and be told immediately how wildly unprepared you are to write. Reading tones and refines the muscle, but there’s got to be a muscle there already, right?
writing shouldn’t scare a lot of people as much as it does. and while there are people who read Pale Fire (sub in any epic novel-type thing) and then gotta start writing immediately on a masterpiece out of inspiration, I think a larger majority finishes it stunned and impressed, but intimidated at the thought of proceeding out of that. sitting down to write and only having bullshit come out is fine. the muscle of production, even if it’s product that ultimately gets deleted, is essential.
This board is full of writers, so here’s a question that’s maybe a roundabout way of answering the post’s question: When you’re stuck, do you just write through it? I ‘read it out’. If it’s an opening, I’ll go to the library and read opening after opening after opening. Or some random idea obsesses me – reading one of the Gaddis novels I don’t understand will help me, or listening to Finnegans Wake on audiobook while I nap will help me, or rereading something I love – Blood Meridian, collected W.M. Spackman, Ice At The Bottom Of The World, &c – will help me. Sometimes I don’t WRITE write for months; nothing more than pocket notebook scribbles a sentence at a time. So I fall into the ‘reading is more important’ camp, but in totally support of my writing.
*total
I know, or feel, that when I’m not writing and feel “stuck” it’s because I’m not reading. I feel kind of empty, and the reading is the food to give me some kind of push/excitement to write. I also just feel better when I’m reading. I’m more patient and focused and this transfers to the rest of the day. So reading might be very important to ones writing, but also on a bigger scale.
WHEN ZZZZIPP IS NOT READING THAT MEANS ZZZZIPP IS SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS AND NOT SPEAKING TO ANYONE. THAT IS AN EMPTYNESS THAT READING ALWAYS HELPS.
I think there is a parallel between writing and playing music. Musicians have to listen to a lot of music, but you have to play a lot too. You have to push yourself. You have to play with other people. You have to play publicly. You have to play and listen to stuff that is hard or outside of your comfort zone.
I interviewed the saxophone player Rudresh Mahanthappa (if you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing his music, check out the album ‘Kinsmen’), and he talked about how the great players would listen to and learn the solos of greats outside of their instrument – Monk learned from Mingus, etcetera. The same goes for writing. Prose writers should read poetry. And on and on.
Writing letters, not email, is important for me and has probably helped my writing more than anything else.
why does there have to be only one important goal in an intro class? a certain kind of person will develop via reading and a certain kind of person via writing, not everyone learns the same way, especially subjects like art and writing. as long as there’s word seepage.
WRITING CAN ALSO BE INHALING, READING EXHALING.
most of my creative writing students never really read before. so discussing fiction begins with learning what the difference between a story is and a television show is. to me, a writer should read and write and think about writing just about every waking hour.
I actually have my intro and lower level fiction classes focus on exercises and writing, though we do read maybe four big books and many flashes. But for grad, I go all out reading. Many, many books in the semester and we closely discuss them all. They write a grand total of one story (at least to bring to class).
I really like this radio show/podcast RadioLab. They like to talk about science. In this one episode, I learned every time you remember something, you’re recreating that memory. Some scientists came up with a protein-inhibitor that stopped mice from forming new memories about how this tool could shock them. Then they gave it to mice who knew it could shock them AS it was shocking them, and they promptly forgot.
So if memory is creation on a cognitive level, how could reading not be?
I’ll take a slightly different tack here: I think it’s important for beginning writers’ reading skills to start writing. When I started to study poetry in school, I had no idea how to read it until I tried to write my own. So many questions occurred to me when I sat in front of a blank page. I started to read with those questions in mind, and my reading skills got exponentially better.
The thing, is Sal, that it’s really hard to guarantee that students in a workshop will have a common vocabulary. It’s a huge assumption that everyone will have read those writers you list because what intro students will read is what their teacher wants them to read. I know that the list you made here is off the top of your head, but I, for example, have never read Barthelme and I’ve only read an insignificant amount of DFW. I barely knew who he was before I started contributing to HTMLGIANT. We would never have a common vocabulary of stories and I think it’s really, and I hate to throw this word out there, elitist, to say that there’s a certain caliber of reading that correlates to improving as a writer. You’re saying that not only do people need to read, but they need to read the “right” stuff. That might be how things work in MFA programs (which I have no problem with) but I don’t think that’s how it works for all the writers who learn to write outside of that system.
I think a fair understanding is indeed necessary but I think that part of acquiring that fair understanding is through practice.
When I get stuck it’s usually because I wanted to write something other than what the writing wanted me to write.
woops, meant to reply to adam
Great comments, Lily. Yes, how to read is important, showing students what to look for in texts, what has been done before and so on. I also agree that writers read to steal and I think my interest in prioritizing writing is that I want to show students how to fence their stolen goods, so to speak.
I believe that Lily makes a key point which is linked to the root of this debacle, that it is more about “how” you read. A lot of the time being well read is misread as one having read the entirety of those they speak of or those they’ve been told about, when in actuality all that it might take is one riveting or raucous paragraph, even a marveling choice of words. Reading in order to keep writing doesn’t necessarily mean you have to finish an entire novel (not that anyone above implied so) but that by opening a random page or choosing to read a poem/short story/article the writer might turn back into themselves enough for them to return with their own writing.
Adam hints at this too–reading opening after opening; after all, it is mostly an idea that the writer obsesses over that drives them to the writing, mostly. Just leaving books open often does it as well, propels one to peek then pen. The “how” factor of reading needs to be mitigated by the writer–too often the dictum “read a lot to write a lot” is misunderstood as “you must know the classics.” This is not true, finding a way to read that allows one to write more is pertinent. However, I personally believe that one can only improve as a writer in reading more, in lettings other ideas and styles bump their own and inch them over. Some writers often speak of a book being so good they had to put it down to write a sentence on their own; inversely, picking up a random book while writing a sentence can be just as moving.
In the teaching realm this is an ongoing splash, the match striking the debacle I mention above. I’ve experienced professors who pledge allegiance to both sides–read a lot first vs. write every day–yet anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class knows that pace is not a shared aspect of writers. The other form of advice I received to work through the “dry” moments is to go back and edit the shit out of all your own stuff. Editing itself is a way of reading and will most likely bring about both more reading and writing. Is writing just an active form or reading-into-something?
roxane, of course there’s no guarantee that a workshop will have a common vocab. sal is saying we (teachers) have to give them that common language. and the best we can hope to do is give them the widest entry point. in a semester you’ll never have enough time to include everyone you want (i, for example, wish i could include more works in translation this semester) but you have to pick something. you set em on the path and hope it piques their interest in wanting to digest widely and deeply.
“all that it might take is one riveting or raucous paragraph”
I sort of disagree. I think this is the way many coarse books present things, but too really know a writer, you need to read as much as possible of their work. The paragraph only functions on the word level. One can never understand writers like Zola or Balzac by reading a single paragraph.
Course books that is….Today my mind is working on sounds – not spelling :)
I think beginning writers, and here I mean anyone who writes anything other people might read, should read in gross quantity. It actually isn’t just about how you read; it does count how MUCH you read. Only with deep immersion in the language do we learn the rhythms and movement and breath of the written word. Writers have fewer tools than speakers, who can use their tone of voice and facial expressions and pauses to get across their meaning. Writers just have words and punctuation, and only reading will expose them to how we process words put in certain ways. Reading a lot trumps any kind of exercise for teaching grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, syntax–any problem area for student writers.
Of course practice is essential, but pure and voluminous exposure can’t be undervalued.
Gene, I note that the list Sal made was arbitrary. But any time you’re trying to instill a common vocabulary I think we have to think about what that implies and what kinds of literature are prioritized. I think the common language can come from more than a given canon of writing. That said, yes, ultimately, as teachers we do have to pick something and set students on the path.
Adam, I definitely do more of the reading, inhaling of “art” and challenging myself with new stuff when I’m stuck. I try to write through the block or the laziness or lack of motivation or whatever-you-call-it, but I find that doesn’t get me anywhere. I ‘read it out’ as well.
In that sense, I’m totally in the reading-as-more-important camp. I don’t care how good someone’s vocab or sentence structure or grasp of a given language is…if they don’t know literature and good writing and how NOT to write, they’ll never get anywhere.
Sure, you have to write to – someday – write WELL, but no one who does not read, a lot, can ever claim to be a great writer.
I agree with that strongly, Roxane — I actually really resent being expected to have read certain texts (and not others) in my MFA. I have this whole degree in English which I mostly spent reading things I didn’t especially want to read and apparently I was supposed to spend my off time reading even more of the dead white guys and a few select living ones so I could be serious. My class is aiming explicitly to open up this whole other avenue to students with non-canonical but still-great writers like the perpetually under-estimated Shirley Jackson, Helen DeWitt, Saul Williams, and etc.
I think the common vocabulary can come from a shared understanding of broader things rather than everyone having read the exact same fifty books.
Great post, and some great comments too. I’ll add, along the lines of what some have already said, that reading for me isn’t just about stealing. It’s also about excavating. Digging into my brain, imagination, worldview. And–and probably more importantly–time. Carving out the time to sit still with a book, and if it’s a challenging one, to tussle with it, to sit still and struggle and gasp. It’s a very similar process, often, as writing, so I think it’s valuable on that level for beginning writers. Sitting down and “just writing”–also valuable. But if they are serious, students will also want to learn how to re-approach what they’ve “just written,” and to hammer at it, push it harder. Grappling with a book and grappling with one’s own work sometimes both require an almost psychotic stillness. The students of mine who claimed not to be “big readers” were also the ones who didn’t like dwelling in their own words.
This is really nice to wake up to and read after a terrible night wherein I was up until 7:30 having horrible paranoid fantasies about my final year at the MFA (sample: everybody shows up to the party after my reading, but they make a point of not talking to me).
I don’t actually exactly disagree with Roxane here. I think the biggest difference in our attitudes here probably comes from my knowledge of the specific student body I’m working with here. I don’t know if I would have liked an intro class taught this way myself, exactly — I had a very traditional “read some, workshop some” structure under Robert Stapleton at Butler and that class was tremendously helpful to me. But the thing is that I came from a relatively privileged background as a student, in that I had been home-schooled and an auto-didact (without pesky things like friends to eat into my time), and so I had already read a tremendous amount before I got there. I still don’t read anywhere near as much as I did then, and I probably never will again, simply because I don’t have the time I did then. I had a really fully-formed idea of myself as a writer, what I wanted to do, and who I admired. I’d already written several novellas and a couple of novels (all awful, of course). I’ve changed a lot since then, thankfully, but the point is I came in there already alive, in many ways, to my own possibilities. And this was common at Butler, because most people there were quite privileged, and had a well-developed sense of what they wanted to be and do.
Students in my class won’t generally be like that. Many will be very smart and many will be very hard-working, but generally speaking I’ve been really shocked by how little Las Cruces students have read in the past. We’ll be writing a lot in this class — every week — and it’ll be a lot of exercises and a lot of free writing, but ultimately I think at the beginning of your idea of yourself as a writer, it’s all about giving you time to sit down with the paper or the computer and giving you resources to rip off, process, rearrange, and make your own. My wife (Tracy Bowling) is teaching the next level up and she’s going to be focusing way, way more on practical writing advice and “craft,” which I think is appropriate and smart. But in the beginning, it’s way more about throwing a lot of shit at the wall and enjoying the mess, for me.
To be clear, the “this is really nice” above is not sarcastic, which it kind of looks to me now — I’m very groggy and dumb at the moment but I’m genuinely happy to see this conversation.
I don’t think one needs to have read a lot to write well, by any means. But I am also amazed at how poorly read most “writers” are. And often enough it shows up in their poems, or stories or whatever.
I honestly do think it is the most important thing. I think more people interested in writing should write much less (or not at all, if need be) and read a whole bunch. Of course, as I’m learning, that’s a hard pill to swallow when so much of your identity is tied up in the word “writer.” There is this feeling that one must get work out now, right now, you must publish a whole lot of shit RIGHT NOW, before you’re thirty, before you’re forty, before–gasp!–your friends first publish their work.
But really that’s just a bunch of BS, all tied up in different forms of self-justification. At least for me. I’m trying to learn to slow down and be patient, to wait for poetry.
Milton believed that those who read and study hard and stay disciplined are those who the Muse most willingly descends upon. I think he was probably right.
I didn’t think it was sarcastic at all! Glad you came over to participate.
And I think it’s most important mainly because it alters and enhances one’s ability to perceive, not necessarily because it makes one all that much more masterful with the language, or whatever.
I agree. Thinking is what good writing is all about, not the mechanical act.
Brendan,
“really know a writer, you need to read as much as possible of their work”–by no means do I think one can KNOW a writer by only reading a paragraph; I am speaking solely of how one gets influenced to write something of their own. Often, and forgive me if I was unclear about this, young or beginning writers are told they need to read everything and if they then subscribe to this it hinders their own writing, in that they may not be figuring out other ways to read than reading someone’s entire catalog.
Amy–I agree that one should read in gross quantities but I also believe that one needs to find a way to do this, not just do it, a way being the “how” factor. Unfortunately, perhaps even fortunately, one cannot be taught how to read something in a way that helps them write–this is where good writing exists for the most part, in that it arrives unattached to a direct link, this or what made it good writing, outside of the self, cannot be traced (side note: it will not be beneficial to get into details about what is meant by “good ” writing here, just whatever one things in this frame).
“Only with deep immersion in the language do we learn the rhythms and movement and breath of the written word.” Is there a way to break this statement down. I think that by unlearning a language or misreading a language we can equally find rhythm. I agree about immersion but there is a very underrepresented and imperative aspect of “how” one immerses themselves. I think that we both agree, however, that it is both about how and how much; it’s just that the how part is iffy. In being iffy, it also remains quite relevant and essential for one to write.
Objectively, maybe, if one’s trying to be inspired (or whatever) by the whole of Zola one needs to examine the whole, but one sentence can and will send me (for example) tear-assing down the page.
I don’t think many people would claim that reading is more important than writing for any writer, but it may be more important for YOUNG writers.
In most fields it is assumed you should study the masters/research/etc. until you have a fair understanding of the field before completely diving into practicing said field. Why not with art or writing?
Can you amplify this? How does it show up? Also, these two statements seem a tad contradictory.
Not even a sentence, really, and certainly not a sentence by a Zola, is needed. ‘the whole of Zola’ probably won’t turn into anything, but my own streak of linguistic OCD isn’t going to let me let it go anytime soon.
BAD WRITING
Both are important, but I’m in the reading is more important camp, simply because too many writers are in a rush (to echo Ryan) and unambitious. The pressure to publish at an earlier age defeats the purpose of “writing a lot” since many writers will publish anything they write. Ambition and a desire for originality, which can only be achieved after years of reading widely and figuring out what’s been done before, are trumped by the desire to write a merely competent story (re: “publishable”).
I admire a writer like Marilynne Robinson who takes her time and reads widely and deeply, and not just fiction.
Roxane and others, there certainly are dangers present in the phrase “common language” and I am fully aware that a truly universal vocabulary in any college classroom is nigh impossible. What I was trying to get at is with undergraduate writing students, it’s often helpful to give them a wide range (aesthetic wise) of texts that everyone can refer to during workshop. For example, if someone is writing a kind of surrealist story that completely lacks character or plausibility, and we as a class have all read Cheever’s “The Swimmer” together, the writer’s peers can point out that story and try and illustrate what work needs to be done during revision by giving a common example.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s some kind of golden list of books and writers all successful writers must read. Like Roxane figured, my list was completely arbitrary and I’m not even that well versed in DFW or Barthelme outside of their short stories and a handful of essays.
ZZZZZIPPP WRITES MORE WHEN ZZZZIPPP READS MORE. EZZPECIALLY WHEN THE WORK READ IS NEW OR CHALLENGING TO THE WAY ZZZZIPP WAS READING BEFORE. (THAT DOESN’T MEAN ONLY READ “AVANT GARDE” WORK, ONLY TO SWITCH IT UP EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE).
READING IS A WAY OF THINKING.
Yeah, Faulkner used to talk about this. He called it refilling the well. I agree with Shane. If I’m feeling out of gas, sometimes the best solution is just to really shake up my reading list.
YES YES YES
(DIDN’T SEE THIS).
I mean there are a few writers who don’t seem that well read, but are clearly geniuses. A writer like Baron Corvo falls into this category. Generally though, most great writers are also very well read.
It shows up in a shallowness of image. In scenes that hold no depth, emotional or otherwise. In hackneyed phrases and a lack of understand of how certain word combinations are correctly used.
One poet I know, who has a good many books published, has one prizes and so forth. He has never read Homer. In conversation:
Poet: “It is like Plato…”
Me: “You like Plato?”
Poet: “I have never read him, but did read something by his student Socrates.”
Me: “You mean Aristotle?”
Poet: “Aristotle?”
This same fellow wrote extensively on Chinese classics, including well known textbooks for schools, but of the 4 major novels in Chinese, he had only read one.
Or, Salvatore, they could use a great surreal sotry that lacks character or plausibility to help the writer do a better job within their own aesthetic + style.
won prizes…cough.
THAT POET HAS NEVER SEEN THE MOON.
I also think that for beginning writers it is much more important for them to experiment, do exercises, write under constraint, imitate writers they hadn’t previously heard of and otherwise be forced to do new writing and not try to complete the novel they started in 10th grade. (They don’t seem to realize that you wouldn’t really want to have that stuff published). Most young writers seem to already be stuck in a rut and already have any idea what kind of writing they want to do and what kind of writer they are. That’s something that needs to be broken down quickly by getting them to read and write new things.
OR IS IT THE SUN? THE MOON IS ON ZZZIPP’S MIND RIGHT NOW.
After the beginning stages though it flips and writing is the far more important side of the equation.
Oh, and like Roxane, I think it’s absolutely vital that we try and give students a wide range of diversity in the readings, be it aesthetically, through gender, race, nationality, sexuality, class, and especially time period. For example, in the workshop I’m teaching this fall, I’ll be using work from Justin Taylor and Kim Chinquee right alongside the canonical stories of the wonderful 3X33 anthology by Mark Winegardner.
“I think that by unlearning a language or misreading a language we can equally find rhythm.”
I agree.
Maybe that’s why a lot of writers run out of things to say–they think they can just coast after reading a few Alice Munro and Ray Carver stories.
Obviously, it’s never an either/or. I just think it’s more helpful to emphasize the reading part since it’s assumed that writers write.
are there “right” books?
Bad assumption in my experience!
I’m going to firmly place myself in the ‘write more’ camp. I read everyday, intensely. I listen to audiobooks in the car, to and from work. But lately, I’ve been finding less and less time to write. I write more cover letters and emails than fiction, or even journaling. My writing has suffered since I graduated, when I had nearly infinite time to write.
it’s like, you don’t get better at skateboarding by sitting around watching videos or hanging around a skatepark. You have to get out there and take some spills and keep doing it. Practice. Sprain an ankle. Jump down a flight of stairs a hundred times before you nail it.
Most of the people who take the time to frequent blogs like this probably don’t fall into the category you’re referring to here.
Don’t you just want to slap Dick W’s face? I know he’d like it.
physical activities require physical practice to get your muscle memory in shape, but reading helps your “writing muscles” and is practice in a way that watching skate videos isn’t for skaters.
I think it’s really beautiful that you’re using contemporaries alongside the ‘canon,’ Salvatore.
Re: common vocab, etc. — the only way that’s going to happen is if all the writers in a class take the same Lit and Writing classes back to back or simultaneously. Otherwise, it’s never going to happen. Not in 2010.
However, I suggest, if you want to foreground a student’s writing w/ an understanding of some technique or lit device, then you can use a story as a model, analyze it, then have the student write, trying to use that style. Then, as a class, everyone can analyze and better understand the effort b/c everyone’s familiar w/ where it’s coming from, i.e., common vocab.
This is a v good post, Roxane, thank you. I’d make the argument that it’s not how widely you read, as a writer of any season, but HOW you read. Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion. (And yes, I’ve stolen that from Wilde, or appropriated it at least.) It’s a completely different mode of reading. Most students who want to write are accustomed to school spaces where you’re taught to read as a lens for analysis. To read to steal requires perhaps even more discernment and criticality than mere analysis. This is what I teach when I teach creative writing. I teach my students how to steal and how to read. Yes, of course, writing is important, but writing does not appear from ether, you know? I’d argue, for a young writer, reading is more important, if only in terms of exposure to ideas. So often, a student will come to me with an epiphany of an idea, and sadly, I know it’s been done, again and again before, so I point her to those texts as examples, places to start, points of departure. And finally, yes, Don Draper.
Yes, Lily. Reading to steal is key.
Yes good points. Writing doesn’t appear from the ether, so if young writers aren’t reading widely their writing is probably appearing from blogs, Twilight fan fiction and Cliff Notes of books in high school that they couldn’t find a film version of…
“Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion.”
That’s it, in a nutshell.
I will tell you the tough thing, though. I can barely get through one novel without feeling another one blasting around in my skull. That’s probably true for most of us so maybe I should complain more that I don’t have the willpower, often, to resist just starting the damn thing.
Yeah. I personally think there’s a certain level where the distinction between writing and reading basically erodes, but I’m not sure I can elucidate that very well.
I am not saying you need to read all 30 or so of his major novels. But something happens in Zola that depends on repitition and other things, that one wouldn’t get from reading an extract.
“The more we read, the less we write.” —Nicanor Parra
I agree. If I were to look at stuff I produced ten years ago, its greatest flaws would probably be in an ignorance of both 1) the ideas and techniques that have been used, both well and terribly, before, and 2) the possibilities that I wasn’t even aware of because I hadn’t read the right books yet.
Reading is inhaling; writing is exhaling…we either implode or explode.
“Writers read to steal, or at least they ought to, in my very humble opinion.”
I think they should read to be stolen from.
Probably the less young writers are told, the better. If they can’t figure it out for themselves, will they through advice? If they are not naturally foracious readers, how could they possibly hope to be great writers?
I like this way of putting it. . . actually I like it a lot. . . although I would add that one can exhale in ways other than writing.
Don’t think I really agree with that. Generally, I think, we write more the more we read. We may not put as many words to paper, but we do write more. Our batting average goes up.
It’s spooky, of course, to wonder also about what I’m missing now. Probably the thing that was most valuable to me in grad school was the reading lists.
Thank you Brendan. ‘Won’ and ‘one’ do sound alike.
After years and years, I still feel like a beginning writer with mistakes aplenty.
The best way to charge up is to read and read and re-read and re-read. Going through a James Salter story dozens of times, ‘Twenty minutes,’ marking it up, watching the curves, the slide of feeling – the story and the way of the story seems to get transmitted to me, implanted say, like an actor knowing his lines – and to speak on that, reading Shakespeare, King Lear over and over again, the language becomes you. You become the characters because you come to know some of those treasured lines like, “The worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ” IV.1 Edgar
I think we’ve all heard those stories of someone like ee cummings saying, You have to read Hamlet ten times. Maybe not ten, but I think we know what he means.
I’m with Lincoln and Tim here. Reading insatiably is important for young writers. When we get students in our intro classes, they often just haven’t read enough. That leads to poor workshops where people in the room don’t have a common vocabulary of stories (JCO, Carver, DFW, Barthelme, Baldwin, Kincaid, etc. etc.). It’s our job to begin forming that common language. Also, young writers are often too affected by narrative devices they see on TV and movies that rarely work well in prose fiction. Writing every day is really important but if all you’ve read is Dragonball Z fanfiction, your prose is never going to get exponetially better. Exposure to different types of fiction is vital.
Agreed. I’m not saying “don’t read,” just write more. There’s an article somewhere about Bill Watterson, who says something about painting like, make 500 paintings and throw them away. Then you can actually start painting. Writing should be like that too.
I disagree with that actually. The more I read the more I write.
There’s an episode of Bookworm where Silverblatt and the guest discussed ‘The Tunnel’. The point was something about how interesting it would have been if Gass had spent 30 years writing a novella, or a short novel. How electric. What I immediately thought, and probably why I remember the conversation, is: how much did he read in those decades? Kinda the same with Robinson- how much do I love the idea of a ‘professional’ writer who (it seems) spends most of her career reading?
I think the emphasis on reading over writing in recent years is due in large part to the current culture of self-expression in which everyone is writing a memoir and considers him/herself a writer, while the publishing industry is dying and we seem to be losing readers (at least of long form literary work) at a very high rate. I often think of writing as a conversation between the author and every other author that person has ever read. The solipsistic i-memoir cult of writing seems to indicate this transition away from readers. The conversations feel increasingly one-sided.
i also think there’s a bit of a tendency to set up very expansive hierarchies. To be “well-read” or even sufficiently so, based on the teacher or writer’s specific preference, involves skads of books – more books than it would be reasonable to tell a young writer to read. I think it’s an intimidating thing to enter a creative space and be told immediately how wildly unprepared you are to write. Reading tones and refines the muscle, but there’s got to be a muscle there already, right?
writing shouldn’t scare a lot of people as much as it does. and while there are people who read Pale Fire (sub in any epic novel-type thing) and then gotta start writing immediately on a masterpiece out of inspiration, I think a larger majority finishes it stunned and impressed, but intimidated at the thought of proceeding out of that. sitting down to write and only having bullshit come out is fine. the muscle of production, even if it’s product that ultimately gets deleted, is essential.
This board is full of writers, so here’s a question that’s maybe a roundabout way of answering the post’s question: When you’re stuck, do you just write through it? I ‘read it out’. If it’s an opening, I’ll go to the library and read opening after opening after opening. Or some random idea obsesses me – reading one of the Gaddis novels I don’t understand will help me, or listening to Finnegans Wake on audiobook while I nap will help me, or rereading something I love – Blood Meridian, collected W.M. Spackman, Ice At The Bottom Of The World, &c – will help me. Sometimes I don’t WRITE write for months; nothing more than pocket notebook scribbles a sentence at a time. So I fall into the ‘reading is more important’ camp, but in totally support of my writing.
*total
I know, or feel, that when I’m not writing and feel “stuck” it’s because I’m not reading. I feel kind of empty, and the reading is the food to give me some kind of push/excitement to write. I also just feel better when I’m reading. I’m more patient and focused and this transfers to the rest of the day. So reading might be very important to ones writing, but also on a bigger scale.
Reading & writing controlled by different parts of the brain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KERQv9FIxkw
Reading opens writers up to this thought: Wow, you can do that? This is what reading has done for me, more than anything else. I’d even argue the Indie community’s books do this more often than other groups. I keep reading these new ways of using those same 26 letters. It energizes my own writing.
I’m sure visual artists, dancers, etc have these same moments–by interacting with other work than their own.
I try to use my grad classes as a way to introduce serious readers (in theory, but it is different than an intro undergrad CW) to seriously odd/wonderful/different types of work. It can spark someone.
You guys on this site always read too much into things.
WHEN ZZZZIPP IS NOT READING THAT MEANS ZZZZIPP IS SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS AND NOT SPEAKING TO ANYONE. THAT IS AN EMPTYNESS THAT READING ALWAYS HELPS.
I think there is a parallel between writing and playing music. Musicians have to listen to a lot of music, but you have to play a lot too. You have to push yourself. You have to play with other people. You have to play publicly. You have to play and listen to stuff that is hard or outside of your comfort zone.
I interviewed the saxophone player Rudresh Mahanthappa (if you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing his music, check out the album ‘Kinsmen’), and he talked about how the great players would listen to and learn the solos of greats outside of their instrument – Monk learned from Mingus, etcetera. The same goes for writing. Prose writers should read poetry. And on and on.
Writing letters, not email, is important for me and has probably helped my writing more than anything else.
I also get that feeling from film, comics, music, games, and everyday objects, of course.
why does there have to be only one important goal in an intro class? a certain kind of person will develop via reading and a certain kind of person via writing, not everyone learns the same way, especially subjects like art and writing. as long as there’s word seepage.
WRITING CAN ALSO BE INHALING, READING EXHALING.
most of my creative writing students never really read before. so discussing fiction begins with learning what the difference between a story is and a television show is. to me, a writer should read and write and think about writing just about every waking hour.
That’s what we live for.
I actually have my intro and lower level fiction classes focus on exercises and writing, though we do read maybe four big books and many flashes. But for grad, I go all out reading. Many, many books in the semester and we closely discuss them all. They write a grand total of one story (at least to bring to class).
I really like this radio show/podcast RadioLab. They like to talk about science. In this one episode, I learned every time you remember something, you’re recreating that memory. Some scientists came up with a protein-inhibitor that stopped mice from forming new memories about how this tool could shock them. Then they gave it to mice who knew it could shock them AS it was shocking them, and they promptly forgot.
So if memory is creation on a cognitive level, how could reading not be?
Reading 1,000 books (arbitrary number meaning “lots”), before writing the first page you’d have the nerve to actually show to a relative stranger, was always a good idea, way back when, but now it’s important for a very new reason: as a counter-balance to dramatic-language-as-a-chiefly-Oral-form… which TV has now, again, standardized.
The Caveman Griot at the campfire added a visual component to her/his presentation, too (grimacing, gesturing, looking spooky-as-fuck), so, that doesn’t make TV a *fundamentally* new form of the Oral: the Oral always had (required?) a built-in Visual. There’s a case to be made that even *silent* films, presenting quick, conversational snatches of printed-narrative and dialogue, was the Oral Tradition slowly sneaking back (to the “West”)… maybe the egalitarian empowerment of electricity had something to do with that .
Years ago I was given a copy of a book of folk tales, by a well-meaning friend (from the very country the folk tales came from) and I was underwhelmed by the texts. And I pinpointed the lack of layering and intensity (on the page) to the fact that Oral Traditions rely on cliche to an *extreme degree* and that’s because they are, essentially, the sound of a tribe or era celebrating itself… the cliches are memes and cues that refer explicitly to a Volk and its memories and practices (vs the esoteric knowledge of an elite or the idiosyncratic territory of some individual’s aesthetic preferences ). The Oral Tradition is all about the communal/generational effort… tellers take the tales and add their little bits and pass them on. There will be a very general feel to such a narrative (like any Hollywood script).
A couple of centuries after the peak of the widespread dominance of the Oral Tradition (and after the Academy found itself admitting chunks from upper reaches of The Volk and teaching them in the manner of the Aristocracy), a new kind of Dramatic Language began to consolidate the paradigm shift: Nth-generations of writers who had read more texts than had heard folk tales were writing more books for future writers to read!
This trend (with the accretive beauty of a natural process) reached a kind of peak… when non-Oral, textual effects in “Western” Lit reached a maximum, syrupy density… some time between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century. Maybe Joyce/Nabokov was an end-point and Shakespeare (the amphibian who could swim as well in the declaimed water as he could climb out and sun himself beautifully on the page) was the middle or tipping-point.
During c. Nabokov, TV started shifting things back… first a little, then a lot. Much of current Fiction just reads a *lot* better, in public (orally) than stuff by Joyce or Nabokov does. The quick test: if re-reading a sentence a couple of times before you move on brings out richer resonances, that sentence probably does not descend from an Oral Tradition (while having an English actor with a plummy voice read your Flash Fiction to a crowd, to give the sentences that layered-resonance feeling, is cheating).
90% of the new texts I read now (mostly, but not exclusively, online) have a predominately Oral feel… a low text-effect-density on the page… because they descend from this New Oral Tradition. The language has that general (conversational) feel of the anti-individualistic, anti-esoteric, created-by-committee, organic Folk Tale but this is an artificial effect: these stories aren’t being handed down, from generation to generation, acquiring a tiny bit of new authorial DNA every time another Griot memorizes them. It’s a technological distortion: they are passed on from TV. TV pretends to serve a community/generation/Volk when it all it does is reach the audience it can physically reach. These are Folk Tales without a Volk. Maybe, with its conversational, anti-esoteric (anti-individualistic/ anti-elitist) language-effects, a lot of current fiction represents a powerful longing for community?
There are two “corrections” for the inherent aesthetic distortions of the Volkless Folk Tale, imo:
1) The stories become Teleplays (as so many clearly want to be) and acquire some force by being enacted or
2) Aspiring writers go back to reading those 1,000 books to build up some textual density on the page… or, any way, read more books than they watch Television.
In any case, something is missing and I’ve spent a few years trying to figure it out.
I’ll take a slightly different tack here: I think it’s important for beginning writers’ reading skills to start writing. When I started to study poetry in school, I had no idea how to read it until I tried to write my own. So many questions occurred to me when I sat in front of a blank page. I started to read with those questions in mind, and my reading skills got exponentially better.
The thing, is Sal, that it’s really hard to guarantee that students in a workshop will have a common vocabulary. It’s a huge assumption that everyone will have read those writers you list because what intro students will read is what their teacher wants them to read. I know that the list you made here is off the top of your head, but I, for example, have never read Barthelme and I’ve only read an insignificant amount of DFW. I barely knew who he was before I started contributing to HTMLGIANT. We would never have a common vocabulary of stories and I think it’s really, and I hate to throw this word out there, elitist, to say that there’s a certain caliber of reading that correlates to improving as a writer. You’re saying that not only do people need to read, but they need to read the “right” stuff. That might be how things work in MFA programs (which I have no problem with) but I don’t think that’s how it works for all the writers who learn to write outside of that system.
I think a fair understanding is indeed necessary but I think that part of acquiring that fair understanding is through practice.
When I get stuck it’s usually because I wanted to write something other than what the writing wanted me to write.
woops, meant to reply to adam
I’m amazed at how many under/graduate students don’t know about the BASS series, or if they do know, make any effort to read it. That seems to be a mandatory book to read every year, imo.
Great comments, Lily. Yes, how to read is important, showing students what to look for in texts, what has been done before and so on. I also agree that writers read to steal and I think my interest in prioritizing writing is that I want to show students how to fence their stolen goods, so to speak.
I believe that Lily makes a key point which is linked to the root of this debacle, that it is more about “how” you read. A lot of the time being well read is misread as one having read the entirety of those they speak of or those they’ve been told about, when in actuality all that it might take is one riveting or raucous paragraph, even a marveling choice of words. Reading in order to keep writing doesn’t necessarily mean you have to finish an entire novel (not that anyone above implied so) but that by opening a random page or choosing to read a poem/short story/article the writer might turn back into themselves enough for them to return with their own writing.
Adam hints at this too–reading opening after opening; after all, it is mostly an idea that the writer obsesses over that drives them to the writing, mostly. Just leaving books open often does it as well, propels one to peek then pen. The “how” factor of reading needs to be mitigated by the writer–too often the dictum “read a lot to write a lot” is misunderstood as “you must know the classics.” This is not true, finding a way to read that allows one to write more is pertinent. However, I personally believe that one can only improve as a writer in reading more, in lettings other ideas and styles bump their own and inch them over. Some writers often speak of a book being so good they had to put it down to write a sentence on their own; inversely, picking up a random book while writing a sentence can be just as moving.
In the teaching realm this is an ongoing splash, the match striking the debacle I mention above. I’ve experienced professors who pledge allegiance to both sides–read a lot first vs. write every day–yet anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class knows that pace is not a shared aspect of writers. The other form of advice I received to work through the “dry” moments is to go back and edit the shit out of all your own stuff. Editing itself is a way of reading and will most likely bring about both more reading and writing. Is writing just an active form or reading-into-something?
i agree with this for young writers, BASS serves as a good primer if you’re studying the field.
roxane, of course there’s no guarantee that a workshop will have a common vocab. sal is saying we (teachers) have to give them that common language. and the best we can hope to do is give them the widest entry point. in a semester you’ll never have enough time to include everyone you want (i, for example, wish i could include more works in translation this semester) but you have to pick something. you set em on the path and hope it piques their interest in wanting to digest widely and deeply.
“all that it might take is one riveting or raucous paragraph”
I sort of disagree. I think this is the way many coarse books present things, but too really know a writer, you need to read as much as possible of their work. The paragraph only functions on the word level. One can never understand writers like Zola or Balzac by reading a single paragraph.
Course books that is….Today my mind is working on sounds – not spelling :)
I think beginning writers, and here I mean anyone who writes anything other people might read, should read in gross quantity. It actually isn’t just about how you read; it does count how MUCH you read. Only with deep immersion in the language do we learn the rhythms and movement and breath of the written word. Writers have fewer tools than speakers, who can use their tone of voice and facial expressions and pauses to get across their meaning. Writers just have words and punctuation, and only reading will expose them to how we process words put in certain ways. Reading a lot trumps any kind of exercise for teaching grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, syntax–any problem area for student writers.
Of course practice is essential, but pure and voluminous exposure can’t be undervalued.
Gene, I note that the list Sal made was arbitrary. But any time you’re trying to instill a common vocabulary I think we have to think about what that implies and what kinds of literature are prioritized. I think the common language can come from more than a given canon of writing. That said, yes, ultimately, as teachers we do have to pick something and set students on the path.
Fuck you, Grandpa.
I hope you die a horrible death in some VA hospital.
I will not (REPEAT NOT) feel guilty at being amazingly prolific at such a young age. I don’t (and WON’T) be bedded down with your misbegotten guilt at not reading 1989e8r90e90 books before writing a number of incisive and clearly publishable work.
Good luck walking down the bookstore (with a walker, no doubt) to buy my next book.
whoops, sorry that should be “to the bookstore”
I’m just FLUSTERED right now at all the sanctimonious assholes on here like you, that Samuel P North jerk, and of course others who won’t be named.
I’m gonna go get my pole waxed and then write something and get it accepted for publishing (IF NOT published) within 72 hours. Go type on your fucking typewriter, Mr. Augustine, while reading some Henry Miller.
Toodles,
The Starched Gila Monster
fuck yeah, love the king kong bundy reference
his battles with the von erichs were epic
i hear abdullah the butcher, now 73, is still wrestling and george the animal steele is now a motivational speaker
Adam, I definitely do more of the reading, inhaling of “art” and challenging myself with new stuff when I’m stuck. I try to write through the block or the laziness or lack of motivation or whatever-you-call-it, but I find that doesn’t get me anywhere. I ‘read it out’ as well.
In that sense, I’m totally in the reading-as-more-important camp. I don’t care how good someone’s vocab or sentence structure or grasp of a given language is…if they don’t know literature and good writing and how NOT to write, they’ll never get anywhere.
Sure, you have to write to – someday – write WELL, but no one who does not read, a lot, can ever claim to be a great writer.
I agree with that strongly, Roxane — I actually really resent being expected to have read certain texts (and not others) in my MFA. I have this whole degree in English which I mostly spent reading things I didn’t especially want to read and apparently I was supposed to spend my off time reading even more of the dead white guys and a few select living ones so I could be serious. My class is aiming explicitly to open up this whole other avenue to students with non-canonical but still-great writers like the perpetually under-estimated Shirley Jackson, Helen DeWitt, Saul Williams, and etc.
I think the common vocabulary can come from a shared understanding of broader things rather than everyone having read the exact same fifty books.
Great post, and some great comments too. I’ll add, along the lines of what some have already said, that reading for me isn’t just about stealing. It’s also about excavating. Digging into my brain, imagination, worldview. And–and probably more importantly–time. Carving out the time to sit still with a book, and if it’s a challenging one, to tussle with it, to sit still and struggle and gasp. It’s a very similar process, often, as writing, so I think it’s valuable on that level for beginning writers. Sitting down and “just writing”–also valuable. But if they are serious, students will also want to learn how to re-approach what they’ve “just written,” and to hammer at it, push it harder. Grappling with a book and grappling with one’s own work sometimes both require an almost psychotic stillness. The students of mine who claimed not to be “big readers” were also the ones who didn’t like dwelling in their own words.
This is really nice to wake up to and read after a terrible night wherein I was up until 7:30 having horrible paranoid fantasies about my final year at the MFA (sample: everybody shows up to the party after my reading, but they make a point of not talking to me).
I don’t actually exactly disagree with Roxane here. I think the biggest difference in our attitudes here probably comes from my knowledge of the specific student body I’m working with here. I don’t know if I would have liked an intro class taught this way myself, exactly — I had a very traditional “read some, workshop some” structure under Robert Stapleton at Butler and that class was tremendously helpful to me. But the thing is that I came from a relatively privileged background as a student, in that I had been home-schooled and an auto-didact (without pesky things like friends to eat into my time), and so I had already read a tremendous amount before I got there. I still don’t read anywhere near as much as I did then, and I probably never will again, simply because I don’t have the time I did then. I had a really fully-formed idea of myself as a writer, what I wanted to do, and who I admired. I’d already written several novellas and a couple of novels (all awful, of course). I’ve changed a lot since then, thankfully, but the point is I came in there already alive, in many ways, to my own possibilities. And this was common at Butler, because most people there were quite privileged, and had a well-developed sense of what they wanted to be and do.
Students in my class won’t generally be like that. Many will be very smart and many will be very hard-working, but generally speaking I’ve been really shocked by how little Las Cruces students have read in the past. We’ll be writing a lot in this class — every week — and it’ll be a lot of exercises and a lot of free writing, but ultimately I think at the beginning of your idea of yourself as a writer, it’s all about giving you time to sit down with the paper or the computer and giving you resources to rip off, process, rearrange, and make your own. My wife (Tracy Bowling) is teaching the next level up and she’s going to be focusing way, way more on practical writing advice and “craft,” which I think is appropriate and smart. But in the beginning, it’s way more about throwing a lot of shit at the wall and enjoying the mess, for me.
To be clear, the “this is really nice” above is not sarcastic, which it kind of looks to me now — I’m very groggy and dumb at the moment but I’m genuinely happy to see this conversation.
You know what they say when you assume…
I feel like this argument is wrongly posited. By the looks of things everybody seems to agree that young writers should be writing AND reading a lot, and widely, with a mind for heterogeneity, the canonical and the non-canonical. Roxane, I agree that a “common vocab” on a certain new canon, if you will, is the wrong way to look at the importance of reading for writers. But Lily, I’m not sure reading for stealing is the best method either. I think the stealing happens unconciously, or by accident. I don’t have anything against the appropriation of writerly techniques, nor the application of myriad writerly techniques. What I have reservations for is the reading for the purpose of self-betterment as a writer. I think writers by nature should be seeking out depths, novelties and distinctions of experience, in whatever mode this eventuates. So, what is so lacking for me on this thread is the importance of a visual literacy for writers, an aural sensitivity, heightened sensitivity to the tangible etc. Why are we not talking about music or cinema or visual arts here? I understand the immediate concern was that binary of writers having to write a lot or read a lot, but I can see failures in both in published authors. Chuck Palahniuk writes too much, his style is so well refined I know precisely where his next adjective will be. Ezra Pound read too much, of being a genius I wouldn’t dare deprive him but most of us would agree aspects of his poetry are like a tour in his library. And you know I’m being facetious by saying ‘read too much’ and ‘wrote too much’, it’s more that the evidence of this reading and this writing have come to overflow the event of the written work itself.
So, I think what this argument highlights are the failures of an ambitious early writer, the need to be writing through a richness of corporeal (lived) and incorporeal experience (represented), and the importance of practice and experimentation for an early writer. And, of course, the failures of wanting to be a writer rather than wanting to write. I would just like to emphasise the importance for writers to be writing because of a compulsion, because there is something they’ve experienced or read or heard that desires to be accounted for, to be expressed and given life as a new thing, added to the event of your writing. It should be at the limit of sense, an interface as soft as a tympanum and as expressive as a vocal cord. This is what I believe some are talking about above when they speak about the line between writing and reading blurring.
I didn’t think it was sarcastic at all! Glad you came over to participate.
Brendan,
“really know a writer, you need to read as much as possible of their work”–by no means do I think one can KNOW a writer by only reading a paragraph; I am speaking solely of how one gets influenced to write something of their own. Often, and forgive me if I was unclear about this, young or beginning writers are told they need to read everything and if they then subscribe to this it hinders their own writing, in that they may not be figuring out other ways to read than reading someone’s entire catalog.
Amy–I agree that one should read in gross quantities but I also believe that one needs to find a way to do this, not just do it, a way being the “how” factor. Unfortunately, perhaps even fortunately, one cannot be taught how to read something in a way that helps them write–this is where good writing exists for the most part, in that it arrives unattached to a direct link, this or what made it good writing, outside of the self, cannot be traced (side note: it will not be beneficial to get into details about what is meant by “good ” writing here, just whatever one things in this frame).
“Only with deep immersion in the language do we learn the rhythms and movement and breath of the written word.” Is there a way to break this statement down. I think that by unlearning a language or misreading a language we can equally find rhythm. I agree about immersion but there is a very underrepresented and imperative aspect of “how” one immerses themselves. I think that we both agree, however, that it is both about how and how much; it’s just that the how part is iffy. In being iffy, it also remains quite relevant and essential for one to write.
Objectively, maybe, if one’s trying to be inspired (or whatever) by the whole of Zola one needs to examine the whole, but one sentence can and will send me (for example) tear-assing down the page.
It’s not a question of which, re reading or writing. It’s both reading AND writing.
A writer doesn’t need to read everything that was ever written from Beowulf onward, but a person who has read hardly anything (which may be more and more common lately) is in for a rude awakening if she or he expects to sit down and, through nothing but repetition, write works that other people would consider worth reading.
Further, I would extend this statement to include those in university writing classes, because without a varied background in reading books–fiction, nonfiction, short stories, or other–a would-be writer is starting out at a severe disadvantage. Floating free and lost, rather than on the firmer footing of the linguistic and narrative learning that only years of reading can provide.
Ideally, one would not only have a solid background in reading books (which of course teaches us, if only at the subconscious level, how language works in written form), but also an aptitude for writing (which the universities can only develop, not provide in full) before setting out to learn the craft of writing.
Independent reading, in addition to whatever is forced on us through schoolwork, is essential. Reading is the brick and mortar that pave the road toward being a writer. Reading books others have written through the years shows us where we have been, where we are, and (hopefully) where we’re going.
Not even a sentence, really, and certainly not a sentence by a Zola, is needed. ‘the whole of Zola’ probably won’t turn into anything, but my own streak of linguistic OCD isn’t going to let me let it go anytime soon.
Roxane and others, there certainly are dangers present in the phrase “common language” and I am fully aware that a truly universal vocabulary in any college classroom is nigh impossible. What I was trying to get at is with undergraduate writing students, it’s often helpful to give them a wide range (aesthetic wise) of texts that everyone can refer to during workshop. For example, if someone is writing a kind of surrealist story that completely lacks character or plausibility, and we as a class have all read Cheever’s “The Swimmer” together, the writer’s peers can point out that story and try and illustrate what work needs to be done during revision by giving a common example.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s some kind of golden list of books and writers all successful writers must read. Like Roxane figured, my list was completely arbitrary and I’m not even that well versed in DFW or Barthelme outside of their short stories and a handful of essays.
Think George still tears apart turnbuckles with his teeth?
Yeah, Faulkner used to talk about this. He called it refilling the well. I agree with Shane. If I’m feeling out of gas, sometimes the best solution is just to really shake up my reading list.
Or, Salvatore, they could use a great surreal sotry that lacks character or plausibility to help the writer do a better job within their own aesthetic + style.
Oh, and like Roxane, I think it’s absolutely vital that we try and give students a wide range of diversity in the readings, be it aesthetically, through gender, race, nationality, sexuality, class, and especially time period. For example, in the workshop I’m teaching this fall, I’ll be using work from Justin Taylor and Kim Chinquee right alongside the canonical stories of the wonderful 3X33 anthology by Mark Winegardner.
“I think that by unlearning a language or misreading a language we can equally find rhythm.”
I agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Seq2rwKucE&feature=related
are there “right” books?
I think it’s really beautiful that you’re using contemporaries alongside the ‘canon,’ Salvatore.
Re: common vocab, etc. — the only way that’s going to happen is if all the writers in a class take the same Lit and Writing classes back to back or simultaneously. Otherwise, it’s never going to happen. Not in 2010.
However, I suggest, if you want to foreground a student’s writing w/ an understanding of some technique or lit device, then you can use a story as a model, analyze it, then have the student write, trying to use that style. Then, as a class, everyone can analyze and better understand the effort b/c everyone’s familiar w/ where it’s coming from, i.e., common vocab.
Yes, Lily. Reading to steal is key.
I am not saying you need to read all 30 or so of his major novels. But something happens in Zola that depends on repitition and other things, that one wouldn’t get from reading an extract.
Probably the less young writers are told, the better. If they can’t figure it out for themselves, will they through advice? If they are not naturally foracious readers, how could they possibly hope to be great writers?
There’s an episode of Bookworm where Silverblatt and the guest discussed ‘The Tunnel’. The point was something about how interesting it would have been if Gass had spent 30 years writing a novella, or a short novel. How electric. What I immediately thought, and probably why I remember the conversation, is: how much did he read in those decades? Kinda the same with Robinson- how much do I love the idea of a ‘professional’ writer who (it seems) spends most of her career reading?
Reading & writing controlled by different parts of the brain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KERQv9FIxkw
Great post, Roxane. Was that really Bill Knott commenting above? Bill Knott’s one of the most well-read writers I’ve ever come across (and, I feel, a great writer). And he quoted Nicanor Parra. A couple quotes from Knott and Parra respectively, not necessarily related to this post:
“A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone” – Bill Knott
“…[W]e couldn’t even afford to drop dead / No wonder they called us the Immortals” – Nicanor Parra
Reading opens writers up to this thought: Wow, you can do that? This is what reading has done for me, more than anything else. I’d even argue the Indie community’s books do this more often than other groups. I keep reading these new ways of using those same 26 letters. It energizes my own writing.
I’m sure visual artists, dancers, etc have these same moments–by interacting with other work than their own.
I try to use my grad classes as a way to introduce serious readers (in theory, but it is different than an intro undergrad CW) to seriously odd/wonderful/different types of work. It can spark someone.
You guys on this site always read too much into things.
Really? I think BASS is a joke. I would never advise a young writer to look at it.
I also get that feeling from film, comics, music, games, and everyday objects, of course.
That’s what we live for.
Reading 1,000 books (arbitrary number meaning “lots”), before writing the first page you’d have the nerve to actually show to a relative stranger, was always a good idea, way back when, but now it’s important for a very new reason: as a counter-balance to dramatic-language-as-a-chiefly-Oral-form… which TV has now, again, standardized.
The Caveman Griot at the campfire added a visual component to her/his presentation, too (grimacing, gesturing, looking spooky-as-fuck), so, that doesn’t make TV a *fundamentally* new form of the Oral: the Oral always had (required?) a built-in Visual. There’s a case to be made that even *silent* films, presenting quick, conversational snatches of printed-narrative and dialogue, was the Oral Tradition slowly sneaking back (to the “West”)… maybe the egalitarian empowerment of electricity had something to do with that .
Years ago I was given a copy of a book of folk tales, by a well-meaning friend (from the very country the folk tales came from) and I was underwhelmed by the texts. And I pinpointed the lack of layering and intensity (on the page) to the fact that Oral Traditions rely on cliche to an *extreme degree* and that’s because they are, essentially, the sound of a tribe or era celebrating itself… the cliches are memes and cues that refer explicitly to a Volk and its memories and practices (vs the esoteric knowledge of an elite or the idiosyncratic territory of some individual’s aesthetic preferences ). The Oral Tradition is all about the communal/generational effort… tellers take the tales and add their little bits and pass them on. There will be a very general feel to such a narrative (like any Hollywood script).
A couple of centuries after the peak of the widespread dominance of the Oral Tradition (and after the Academy found itself admitting chunks from upper reaches of The Volk and teaching them in the manner of the Aristocracy), a new kind of Dramatic Language began to consolidate the paradigm shift: Nth-generations of writers who had read more texts than had heard folk tales were writing more books for future writers to read!
This trend (with the accretive beauty of a natural process) reached a kind of peak… when non-Oral, textual effects in “Western” Lit reached a maximum, syrupy density… some time between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century. Maybe Joyce/Nabokov was an end-point and Shakespeare (the amphibian who could swim as well in the declaimed water as he could climb out and sun himself beautifully on the page) was the middle or tipping-point.
During c. Nabokov, TV started shifting things back… first a little, then a lot. Much of current Fiction just reads a *lot* better, in public (orally) than stuff by Joyce or Nabokov does. The quick test: if re-reading a sentence a couple of times before you move on brings out richer resonances, that sentence probably does not descend from an Oral Tradition (while having an English actor with a plummy voice read your Flash Fiction to a crowd, to give the sentences that layered-resonance feeling, is cheating).
90% of the new texts I read now (mostly, but not exclusively, online) have a predominately Oral feel… a low text-effect-density on the page… because they descend from this New Oral Tradition. The language has that general (conversational) feel of the anti-individualistic, anti-esoteric, created-by-committee, organic Folk Tale but this is an artificial effect: these stories aren’t being handed down, from generation to generation, acquiring a tiny bit of new authorial DNA every time another Griot memorizes them. It’s a technological distortion: they are passed on from TV. TV pretends to serve a community/generation/Volk when it all it does is reach the audience it can physically reach. These are Folk Tales without a Volk. Maybe, with its conversational, anti-esoteric (anti-individualistic/ anti-elitist) language-effects, a lot of current fiction represents a powerful longing for community?
There are two “corrections” for the inherent aesthetic distortions of the Volkless Folk Tale, imo:
1) The stories become Teleplays (as so many clearly want to be) and acquire some force by being enacted or
2) Aspiring writers go back to reading those 1,000 books to build up some textual density on the page… or, any way, read more books than they watch Television.
In any case, something is missing and I’ve spent a few years trying to figure it out.
Yeah, BASS jumped the sharked for me years ago. It’s the same damn people every year publishing in the same five journals that last accepted a solicited story 20 years ago. The “new voices” are almost always people who just landed book deals, which makes you wonder about the selection process….most of the stories are safe and don’t take chances. If you want to teach a young writer that writing can’t be fun, humorous, and playful, then assign BASS.
Besides, think anthologies can terribly limiting for an instructor. It’s like feeding your students sampler platters instead of meals. I usually assign two full collections.
*I think anthologies can be terribly limiting for an instructor
**unsolicited
I’m amazed at how many under/graduate students don’t know about the BASS series, or if they do know, make any effort to read it. That seems to be a mandatory book to read every year, imo.
i agree with this for young writers, BASS serves as a good primer if you’re studying the field.
“I would never advise a young writer to look at it.”
why not? or, what’s jokey about it?
Jesus Christ, sorry for the typos in my last post. I shouldn’t type in the dark.
Fuck you, Grandpa.
I hope you die a horrible death in some VA hospital.
I will not (REPEAT NOT) feel guilty at being amazingly prolific at such a young age. I don’t (and WON’T) be bedded down with your misbegotten guilt at not reading 1989e8r90e90 books before writing a number of incisive and clearly publishable work.
Good luck walking down the bookstore (with a walker, no doubt) to buy my next book.
whoops, sorry that should be “to the bookstore”
I’m just FLUSTERED right now at all the sanctimonious assholes on here like you, that Samuel P North jerk, and of course others who won’t be named.
I’m gonna go get my pole waxed and then write something and get it accepted for publishing (IF NOT published) within 72 hours. Go type on your fucking typewriter, Mr. Augustine, while reading some Henry Miller.
Toodles,
The Starched Gila Monster
fuck yeah, love the king kong bundy reference
his battles with the von erichs were epic
i hear abdullah the butcher, now 73, is still wrestling and george the animal steele is now a motivational speaker
i do like that anchor anthology for nonmajor intro to lit class stuff. i dont think id pick up bass though for reading/teaching. i dunno.
You know what they say when you assume…
I feel like this argument is wrongly posited. By the looks of things everybody seems to agree that young writers should be writing AND reading a lot, and widely, with a mind for heterogeneity, the canonical and the non-canonical. Roxane, I agree that a “common vocab” on a certain new canon, if you will, is the wrong way to look at the importance of reading for writers. But Lily, I’m not sure reading for stealing is the best method either. I think the stealing happens unconciously, or by accident. I don’t have anything against the appropriation of writerly techniques, nor the application of myriad writerly techniques. What I have reservations for is the reading for the purpose of self-betterment as a writer. I think writers by nature should be seeking out depths, novelties and distinctions of experience, in whatever mode this eventuates. So, what is so lacking for me on this thread is the importance of a visual literacy for writers, an aural sensitivity, heightened sensitivity to the tangible etc. Why are we not talking about music or cinema or visual arts here? I understand the immediate concern was that binary of writers having to write a lot or read a lot, but I can see failures in both in published authors. Chuck Palahniuk writes too much, his style is so well refined I know precisely where his next adjective will be. Ezra Pound read too much, of being a genius I wouldn’t dare deprive him but most of us would agree aspects of his poetry are like a tour in his library. And you know I’m being facetious by saying ‘read too much’ and ‘wrote too much’, it’s more that the evidence of this reading and this writing have come to overflow the event of the written work itself.
So, I think what this argument highlights are the failures of an ambitious early writer, the need to be writing through a richness of corporeal (lived) and incorporeal experience (represented), and the importance of practice and experimentation for an early writer. And, of course, the failures of wanting to be a writer rather than wanting to write. I would just like to emphasise the importance for writers to be writing because of a compulsion, because there is something they’ve experienced or read or heard that desires to be accounted for, to be expressed and given life as a new thing, added to the event of your writing. It should be at the limit of sense, an interface as soft as a tympanum and as expressive as a vocal cord. This is what I believe some are talking about above when they speak about the line between writing and reading blurring.
It’s not a question of which, re reading or writing. It’s both reading AND writing.
A writer doesn’t need to read everything that was ever written from Beowulf onward, but a person who has read hardly anything (which may be more and more common lately) is in for a rude awakening if she or he expects to sit down and, through nothing but repetition, write works that other people would consider worth reading.
Further, I would extend this statement to include those in university writing classes, because without a varied background in reading books–fiction, nonfiction, short stories, or other–a would-be writer is starting out at a severe disadvantage. Floating free and lost, rather than on the firmer footing of the linguistic and narrative learning that only years of reading can provide.
Ideally, one would not only have a solid background in reading books (which of course teaches us, if only at the subconscious level, how language works in written form), but also an aptitude for writing (which the universities can only develop, not provide in full) before setting out to learn the craft of writing.
Independent reading, in addition to whatever is forced on us through schoolwork, is essential. Reading is the brick and mortar that pave the road toward being a writer. Reading books others have written through the years shows us where we have been, where we are, and (hopefully) where we’re going.
Think George still tears apart turnbuckles with his teeth?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Seq2rwKucE&feature=related
An Unsurprising Path of Thought
The first person who reads what you write will (probably) be – yourself. You want to be an expert reader of your own writing, so as to be able to show other people what you most want them to read (that you wrote).
So becoming clever – or at least, clearer to yourself – at reading is a useful way to become more skilled at writing what you want to show other people – useful and, (in this case) by virtue of an equiprimordial entwinement, pleasurable.
Reading other people’s writing, especially in a critical way/environment, is a helpful – I think: ineluctably an effective – way for you to become a more expert editor of your writing.
(Not that “reading” is the only factor in the composition and mutation of your literary self, but reading is a way you can cultivate – by yourself and with support/guidance/resistance – that self, that activity, with, among other pleasures, an increase in your control over what you write that you want other people to read.)
Great post, Roxane. Was that really Bill Knott commenting above? Bill Knott’s one of the most well-read writers I’ve ever come across (and, I feel, a great writer). And he quoted Nicanor Parra. A couple quotes from Knott and Parra respectively, not necessarily related to this post:
“A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone” – Bill Knott
“…[W]e couldn’t even afford to drop dead / No wonder they called us the Immortals” – Nicanor Parra
Really? I think BASS is a joke. I would never advise a young writer to look at it.
Yeah, BASS jumped the sharked for me years ago. It’s the same damn people every year publishing in the same five journals that last accepted a solicited story 20 years ago. The “new voices” are almost always people who just landed book deals, which makes you wonder about the selection process….most of the stories are safe and don’t take chances. If you want to teach a young writer that writing can’t be fun, humorous, and playful, then assign BASS.
Besides, think anthologies can terribly limiting for an instructor. It’s like feeding your students sampler platters instead of meals. I usually assign two full collections.
*I think anthologies can be terribly limiting for an instructor
**unsolicited
“I would never advise a young writer to look at it.”
why not? or, what’s jokey about it?
Jesus Christ, sorry for the typos in my last post. I shouldn’t type in the dark.
i do like that anchor anthology for nonmajor intro to lit class stuff. i dont think id pick up bass though for reading/teaching. i dunno.
“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” – will faulk
An Unsurprising Path of Thought
The first person who reads what you write will (probably) be – yourself. You want to be an expert reader of your own writing, so as to be able to show other people what you most want them to read (that you wrote).
So becoming clever – or at least, clearer to yourself – at reading is a useful way to become more skilled at writing what you want to show other people – useful and, (in this case) by virtue of an equiprimordial entwinement, pleasurable.
Reading other people’s writing, especially in a critical way/environment, is a helpful – I think: ineluctably an effective – way for you to become a more expert editor of your writing.
(Not that “reading” is the only factor in the composition and mutation of your literary self, but reading is a way you can cultivate – by yourself and with support/guidance/resistance – that self, that activity, with, among other pleasures, an increase in your control over what you write that you want other people to read.)
Hi Corey– Stealing by accident is perhaps the worst kind of stealing. Better to be conscientious of it, engage in conversation. What I mean by “stealing” is not plagiarism. I mean to read with discernment, with a keen eye. I mean, the opposite way of reading than is taught in an English lit course.
This does mean I don’t believe people shouldn’t read broadly. Nor does it mean that they should only be reading. You make an excellent point about diversity. Writers–young writers, old writers, whatever–ought to go out, listen to music (of all types, go see a quartet play, then go to an indie rock show, then go see an experimental band), see art (again of all types, not just museums and galleries, but walls and tunnels filled with graffiti), etc etc. Yes, I agree. I agree.
Reading for historical breadth is often overlooked in these conversations. There’s so much emphasis on style and craft here, but not enough on history. A writer should have an understanding of literary history (see T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and The Individual Talent”).
Too many contemporary writers act as if they’re doing something new or blazing a path, when what they’re doing isn’t as new as they think, and often shallow and historically disengaged.. An “avant garde” writer once laughed at me for my love of Victorian Lit, esp. Dickens. I was floored, because Dickens was a maniac and deliciously wild. Same for many other Victorian works.
Hi Corey– Stealing by accident is perhaps the worst kind of stealing. Better to be conscientious of it, engage in conversation. What I mean by “stealing” is not plagiarism. I mean to read with discernment, with a keen eye. I mean, the opposite way of reading than is taught in an English lit course.
This does mean I don’t believe people shouldn’t read broadly. Nor does it mean that they should only be reading. You make an excellent point about diversity. Writers–young writers, old writers, whatever–ought to go out, listen to music (of all types, go see a quartet play, then go to an indie rock show, then go see an experimental band), see art (again of all types, not just museums and galleries, but walls and tunnels filled with graffiti), etc etc. Yes, I agree. I agree.
Reading for historical breadth is often overlooked in these conversations. There’s so much emphasis on style and craft here, but not enough on history. A writer should have an understanding of literary history (see T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and The Individual Talent”).
Too many contemporary writers act as if they’re doing something new or blazing a path, when what they’re doing isn’t as new as they think, and often shallow and historically disengaged.. An “avant garde” writer once laughed at me for my love of Victorian Lit, esp. Dickens. I was floored, because Dickens was a maniac and deliciously wild. Same for many other Victorian works.
THERE IS A PILE OF PAPER OUTSIDE MY WINDOW AND EVERY NIGHT THE MAN WITH TINY HANDS FOR FEET CLIMBS IT AND SOON THE PILE WILL REACH THE WINDOW AND HE WILL COME IN AND MURDER ME.
THERE IS A PILE OF PAPER OUTSIDE MY WINDOW AND EVERY NIGHT THE MAN WITH TINY HANDS FOR FEET CLIMBS IT AND SOON THE PILE WILL REACH THE WINDOW AND HE WILL COME IN AND MURDER ME.
Set Up Your Speakers…
I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog :)…
Not too much to contribute, as it’s true in the “disciplinary” “well-formed muscle” sense that writers should be reading all the time. And even though I am the type of young writer whose reading practices would horrify older writers, I am coming to understand this. However, I disagree that writing doesn’t come from nowhere, because if poetry truly comes close to alchemy, its origins should still be mysterious.
Not too much to contribute, as it’s true in the “disciplinary” “well-formed muscle” sense that writers should be reading all the time. And even though I am the type of young writer whose reading practices would horrify older writers, I am coming to understand this. However, I disagree that writing doesn’t come from nowhere, because if poetry truly comes close to alchemy, its origins should still be mysterious.
Listening is equally, if not more, important than reading. Listening to lots of different voices and ways of speaking, learning how people talk. Dialogue is usually the difference between good writing and incredible writing.
Listening is equally, if not more, important than reading. Listening to lots of different voices and ways of speaking, learning how people talk. Dialogue is usually the difference between good writing and incredible writing.
sounds like you got yourself one them homunculus problems, boss.
call Wally Shawn!
call Wally Shawn!
There is a sleaziness about Don Draper but I find it terribly attractive.
Am I the only person in America who think Don Draper is sleazy + weird?