Creative Writing

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CHAPTER TWO

CREATIVE READING Creative writers read differently than do literature students or casual bookstore shoppers or beach readers. We’re reading for pleasure, of course. But we’re also intent on developing our craft. By reading closely and strategically, with a very specific and perhaps somewhat selfish agenda, we read to pick up new techniques we can use in our own creative efforts.

Writers approach reading as musicians do live shows: for enjoyment, yes, but also to expose ourselves to new moves, to learn more of what’s possible, to get inspired. Just as musicians often listen to thousands of hours of music, obsessively, writers read voraciously.

We aren’t able to confine ourselves to one section of the library or to one specific type of book in a bookstore. Creative writers are free-range readers, roaming from new works by young authors hot off the press over to poetry, perhaps dabbling in the classics before grazing over to science fiction, eagerly hunting down novels, comics, plays, and pieces that defy genre classification written by authors of all ages, from the ancients to the postmodernists, and from all over the globe. We tend to be delightfully undisciplined and radically inclusive in our choices: We’ll read pretty much anything. We read and read and read. Because there is so much to learn about the craft of writing, our reading lives are driven by a particular hunger: We read to live, artistically. We learn to write—and continue to improve—by reading. As a writer, literature is our most valuable teacher—an especially wallet-friendly kind of education—for years to come.