I recently finished a four-part series of posts about what sustains my writing. Now for the ugly part: what keeps me from writing.
One of the biggest troublemakers is not reading enough.
I’ll start off by saying this: I miss my library a lot. It provided so many important things. Not just books to pick up, examine and read, but a year-round neighborhood haunt and a much-needed quiet space. During the years prior to publishing Courage Says “Keep On,” I was a frequent visitor to the study rooms at Denver Public Library’s Eugene Field branch . As the manuscript neared completion, those rooms were sacred space for my writing. Once I closed the door behind me, the plain walls and silence evoked an almost visceral response to settle down and work.
On my way from the library’s front door to the study room, though, were (and are) books. Not once did I ever go directly to the room without stopping at one shelf or another, to the left or right, picking up a book and tucking it under my arm for later. For me, books cannot be ignored, no matter how dire the deadline.
Reading is as essential as breathing. Think of a lake—the health of its water is supported by inbound and outbound moving streams. If those two forces are balanced, that’s even better. In that same manner, my mind’s outbound channel, writing, needs both the lake and an inbound channel, reading, for optimum performance.
It’s not necessarily the direct inspiration from other writers that I draw on, although that’s sometimes the case. Maybe it’s the way a book is structured and organized, maybe it’s the content or the style. But always, the act of reading sustains the act of writing.
Back to the title of this blog: these days, I’m not reading enough. There’s a feedback loop that brings this about: stress, fatigue and discouragement. Then the twin red flags appear: my pile of books I’m reading goes down more and more slowly, and/or I find myself spending more time re-reading favorite books than reading new ones. Sometimes another symptom rears its ugly head: frequent news check-ins as I sit at my laptop. I can feel the temptation growing as I write these words!
I could also call this unfortunate state a reading desert. It has to be crossed, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Thankfully, my current one seems to be in transition from middle to end.
I wish I could walk up to Eugene Field Library right now and plug in to the book lifeline. Today I passed it by on my morning run. I gazed longingly at the books, neatly arranged on their shelves. Like friends in COVID quarantine, in-person contact will have to wait.
In my small house, there are 17 bookshelves, all of them full, and I haven’t read them all. There are even more unread books from my late father’s collection, stored in five boxes in a closet. So it’s not as if I don’t have the opportunity to read—on the contrary, I am blessed with an abundance of accessible printed material. But when I’m in one of those reading deserts, as I am now, nothing jumps out at me and asks to be read. I stake out some time alone, pick up a likely prospect, sit back, and…read about three pages.
Eventually this unfortunate cycle decays and my time spent reading begins to trend upward. And..so does my time spent writing.
The end part of the cycle is the worst, when the fatigue that caused the reading desert starts to wear off. In the distance, I start seeing the finish line. Instead of a balloon arch, it’s lined with books!
