What Are You Reading?
I harp on reading often. Writing and reading are like cooking and eating. You can’t be a great cook if you don’t enjoy the flip-side pleasure of savoring a well-prepared meal. The two are one, and often it is a love for reading that leads you to a love for writing. But then you take the step into “being a writer,” and in all the writing, editing, critiquing, submitting, you lose the hunger for a good book.
Or you think you do. I theorize that the book-hunger never dies. It idles, while your energy is spent on creating. It rests while you produce. When you feel your freelance bones beginning to dry up, though, it’s time. Open your mouth. Eat up.
There’s a difference between eating to survive and eating to be satisfied, and there is the same difference between reading what you must and reading to be refreshed. A loaf of bread and a cup of water might do you for the former, but you need a thoughtfully prepared and seasoned array for the latter. A few dry, non-fiction articles, bullet-pointed tip lists, and a lengthy blog selection will get you through the day and get your pieces produced, but you need a real book, an eat-it-up book for those writing bones to be rejuvenated.
Don’t skimp on your reading. You may think you have no time for a novel or a thick biography or a volume of poems. You do. You must find it. You must make it. Your writing, in a way, does depend on it.
You need the food of words and stories to fill you up, unconsciously, as you delight in the sheer experience of them. There are too many times when you must read simply to accumulate information. Be sure that those are not the only times you read.
Check these sites for reading recommendations:
The Book Stacks
Genre Fiction
Blue Archipelago
Book Reviews for Real People
One-Minute Book Reviews
Make it a good day.
Image Credit: kygp.
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