Reading, Because If There Was Another Way to Get Better, Someone Would Have Figured It By Now
My first semester as a grad student, everyone thought I was a douche, and to be fair, they still do but one with whom they don’t mind having a drink and sharing their lives. Back then, however, I was the odd man out. For one, I was the youngest of my cohort. Furthermore, I was probably the most prentenious of the bunch by far. But the thing that bothered my peers the most was that I seemingly had read everything. That’s no mere boast, mind you. My knowledge of the classics was so extensive that when my instructors quizzed us on the openings of great stories and novels, I easily had the high score that day. Kaylie Jones even made a joke of it, when I confessed that I hadn’t read a story by de Maupassant: She said, “Wait, there’s something you haven’t read.” After class, my peers asked me where I had gone for undergrad–did I go to some special prep school? To their surprise, their was nothing fancy about my upbringing or my education. My parents weren’t wealthy. I worked throughout college at UPS. I had graduated from a public high school with little distinction and a public university with even less. So how did I, at twenty-two, read more of the canon than writers who were my age in triplicate?
The short answer is simple: the internet.
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When I was in high school, I hated reading. It’s a miracle that I passed at all, since I did everything I could to avoid completing an assigned text. I can honestly say that I finished a handful of books over the course of my secondary education. What was the point? TV was twice as fast and a hell of a lot less boring. Besides, what use would it serve me? I was going to be a nuclear physicist.
The only thing I could choke down was poetry. It was short, which was nice, but the other thing about it was its play with language. I’ve always had a ear for music, for the beauty of sounds, naturally-attuned for euphony. I just liked the way some words sounded next to others. I liked it so much I began to write poetry myself. My friends would remark how any time they saw me I had a pen and paper in hand, furiously scribbling. And that love of poetry followed me to college, and so did my love of movies and philosophy. My love of physics, however, did not.
If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was studying, and in order to succeed in my science courses, I was expected to memorize all manners of formulas. But where was the critical thinking, the application of ideas, the innovation? Physics and calculus didn’t offer any of that, so I guess that’s why I failed both. But it didn’t phase me all that much. It was a chance for me to discover what I really wanted. I didn’t want to have a career where I plugged numbers into a calculator and charted a graph: I wanted something meaningful. I wanted a job that didn’t feel like work, that came naturally, because if I did have to study, I’d never graduate.
I thought about the things I was good at, the things I did well, the ones people had said I did better than most. In tenth grade, I remembered, my English teacher said I should major in creative writing. At the time, I thought he was full of shit. But then I realized, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, as early as fifth grade, people were saying I had a way with words. It was theme that kept reoccuring, and I kept ignoring. But if I was going to be a writer, how would I learn to get better?
The answer was obvious: I had to read.
At first, I picked up books others had recommended, like Fight Club, or ones by poets I had enjoyed, like Sylvia Plath. It was during this time that I realized that reading wasn’t such a chore; in fact, it was a lot like watching a movie. It had all the things I liked about Star Wars or Back to the Future, the only difference was that I had to imagine it. I also learned that writing sentences was pretty damn similar to writing poetry. It didn’t take long for me to exhaust the few books my friends had loaned me. Worse still, I had no where to start. How would I know where to start on my own?
My talk with the librarian proved fruitless. Most of my classes were general education courses, and none of the teachers seemed particularly helpful. Then the idea occurred to me. I was pretty good on the computer. I had used it to enhance my knowledge of music and film. I had torrented hundreds of classic albums and films–from a list I complied by spending hours every night on Wikipedia. (My instructors over the years are probably having a mild heart attack at this moment.) The site had been invaluable to me. They had articles on the history of film, notes on significant achievements in the artform, even little footnotes that led me further down the rabbithole. Why couldn’t–or bet yet, shouldn’t–I use this tool to help with my new goal?
So I did. I sorted through page after page, clicking on links and footnotes, following the thread as far as it would go. I checked out books from the library, and when I couldn’t get them for free, I gave up buying lunch to buy a book instead. I didn’t read books based on their description, only reputation alone. Many were very good books, like Notes from Underground or Blood Meridian; others were not so good, like The Bluest Eye or Home to Harlem. Regardless, every novel presented some new skill for me to learn or avoid. The good books showed me how to write with care, how to search for that one perfect word (le mot juste), to give as much attention to my prose as my characters, to set a scene. The bad books showed me what dreck looked like on the page and spurred me to try, because, I reasoned, if shit like that can get published, why can’t I?
Every few weeks, I would go through my supply and search the web for a new fix. I used the Time list, the Modern Library list. I read anything I got my hands on, and when I switched from physics to English, I had even more books to enjoy. My best semester introduced me to Crime and Punishment, Song of Solomon, Midnight’s Children, and The Death of Artemio Cruz from just one class. I got to the point where I was reading three or four books a week at least. Sometimes even, I’d put down one novel to pick another immediately.
I had become an addict.
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I’ve been teaching college for three years now, and in that time, I’ve managed to have quite a few students who have made me proud. More rare, however, have been those who chose to write, who have that yearning, that boundless ambition to press pen to page. They often come to me for advice, and I think, they’re often disappointed with what I have to say. They say, I have an idea for a story. It’s about this guy who…. They give me every piece of it, scene by scene, and ask me what I think. Typically, I like it. Then I give them the bad news: Where are the pages? Usually, they shrug and say they keep throwing them out. I’m quick to remind them that they’ve produced fine writing in the past, and they will contnue to do so. All they have to do is write it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, because it’s a draft. There’s plenty of time to fix it. The words aren’t static, fixed there forever: They can be changed. Then they say, What about Hemingway–how can I ever compare to him?
Try, I say, just try.
The writing you never do is writing that you can never assess, that you can never know the true worth of. My former students who want to write take it for granted that their heroes struggled themselves. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-four times before he was happy with it. And I doubt that Hemingway learned his craft in a vacuum. He studied the masters; he emulated them–as did everyone else.
Ben Franklin famously taught himself to read and write. For him, those two things went hand-in-hand. The man himself, more or less, invented the American style. But he didn’t do so in a day. It took years of practice. His method was simple: He found a piece of writing he thought was particularly impressive (for him this was The Spectator), tried to memorize it as best he could, and then wrote out those sentences and paragraphs. After he finished, he would look at his work and then the original and compare. Sometimes, he discovered he had improved the style; other times, he discovered he hadn’t. But that learning process was enormously important in his growth as a writer. He learned what good writers did and then did them himself. His case is not unique as I’ve said already. Hunter S. Thompson copied pages of The Great Gatsby just to know what it felt like to type out Fitzgerald’s prose.
As children, we do this instinctually. We mimic the sounds and phrases of our parents and those around us. We learn the language by copying the way others use it. The same goes for writing. A lot of it comes through osmosis. By seeing the same things over and over again, we adopt those choices as our own. But there’s more a young writer can do, and it requires something we so rarely give: careful and considerate thought.
If we passively read, there’s only so much we can learn; however, if we look at a sentence and ask why, we begin to strive towards something greater. Every word, every mark of punctuation, every paragraph break, the order of the sentences, their length, their construction–all of these things are a choice, whether we recognize it or not.
Emerson demonstrates it best: “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.”
This sentence alone is a testament to his genius. Look at the sentence above. We’ll skip the diction choices and focus solely on punctuation. Emerson could have written it like this: “First we eat, then we beget. First we read, then we write.” Or he could have done this: “First we eat. Then we beget. First we read. Then we write.”
Notice anything?
The two latter examples don’t have the same, and I hate to use the word because it’s so ill-defined, flow. They just don’t sound right. Why?
Emerson’s sentence is perfection because the construction draws a parallel. It serves as an analogy: Eating is to reading as begetting (procreating, making babies) is to writing. Had he choosen one of the alternatives, that connection would have been lessened or even lost. The order of the words are the same in both clauses, separated by a semi-colon. Can that be copied or imitated? Of course, it can. Emerson doesn’t own the copyright to that structure. It’s free to use as you like–and so is the rest of the canon.
Everything is a technique. It’s just a matter of trying it out for yourself, or as T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Immature poets borrow; mature poets steal.”
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People tend to forget the age we live in and the resources available to us. As far as access to knowledge goes, this is the best time to be alive. There’s a whole world of information on the internet just begging us to look at it. Project Gutenberg hosts just about every novel in existence that is out of copyright. Wikipedia is a pretty damn good encyclopedia. Sparknotes and Shmoop are there to help us understand those difficult texts. And the best part is that they’re all available for free. If you wanted to read through the works of Homer in the past, like say in 1300s, you had better be rich or have access to a serious library, since books had to be produced by hand. Or If you wanted to read every one of Shakespeare’s plays, in say 1900, you better get your butt to the bookstore and have some cash on hand, because even though his work had been out of copyright and could be printed for free by anyone, the only way you could get it was in hard copy. Furthermore, good luck getting anyone to explain it to you back in the day. Unless you knew some slick literature professor, you were on your own. Now, you don’t even have to leave the bathroom for all that and more.
It’s amazing that we have all these devices in arm’s reach at any given moment, and we don’t even bother to log off Facebook or Instagram for a minute to see what else is out there. It’s no wonder people call us entitled. We don’t seem to realize the power we hold in the palms of our hands.
I did, but I’m the exception, not the rule–not that I’m anything special. And don’t think I’m discounting the legion of educators I’ve had in my life. Without them, I am nothing. But I didn’t expect to be spoon-fed the rest of my life either. I knew there would be a time when I would have to step out on my own, and I committed myself to it. The question, then, is obvious: Will you?