It wasn’t that long ago that I mentioned one of the many quagmires of novel writing—or at least one of my personal predicaments. As one might expect of a writer, I very much love to read. As one might expect of an amateur novelist, my favorite literary form is the novel. I love novels to the extent that I fantasize about the apocalypse just so I have time to read them. Luckily for me I wear contacts so there’s no danger of my glasses breaking when they fall on a rock. I’ve been known to worship novels. I suppose it goes without saying, my reason for writing one.
This is the quagmire: when you (meaning me) are writing a novel, your focus is shifted. It’s more difficult to take it in as a complete work of art. Instead you get hung up on certain sentences, a character’s mannerisms, the overarching structure. In time the novel has your thinking so warped that you have to put it down. Not to mention the way novels haunt your own prose style. What happens when you read too much Faulkner? Your sentences try to crawl outside of themselves. You’re tempted to use the word crepuscular.
So what does a lover of books do? Writing a novel is a long process. I’m currently working through my second draft and while I’m moving at an alarming pace I realize there is still a long stretch of writing before me. Writing the initial draft took three months. With all that novel left to write and rewrite you can’t simply tell yourself that you’ll read again when it’s over. You have to compromise.
I am reading poetry. I am reading essays. I am reading philosophy and criticism. Unless it’s a singular cohesive text I don’t even bother reading the whole book. I’ve read portions of books from Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Wright, T. S. Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve read essays both comical and awe-inspiring from Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace. I’m in the middle of one of the most fascinating philosophical literary texts I’ve ever read: Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. What is interesting, I’ve noticed, is that I’m not reading in the same way that I’ve always read. Again, novel writing has warped my sensibilities. When I read Anne Carson I’m looking for something. I’m searching. There is something she’s trying to tell me and I’m going to use it in my work. I read as a novelist these days, gathering information. I can tell that Eros the Bittersweet is going to be a strong influence on my next novel, which at the moment is only a title and a document full of notes. Reading has become research, and as horrifying as that sounds it’s more exhilarating than anything because I’m loving every moment of it.
That is how the reader in me is surviving. Yesterday I took a holiday and spent the day at home. Toward the middle of the afternoon I spread a blanket on the grass in my back yard and in what may have been a writer’s fantasy I listened to the birds and read about the triangular structure of love. I even managed to incorporate a bowl of cherries, as though the symbolic representation of happiness wasn’t yet complete. Even though reading can be a toxic enterprise you can’t put reading on hold. It keeps you grounded in the rest of the world. For a while I was wholly absorbed in my novel and I let nothing else in. You start to feel anxious. Even though you think you’re putting all your creative energy into a novel there is a piece left unused: that creativity that occurs when you encounter something inspirational—a logical conundrum or a scientific fact or a little piece of history. You have to keep feeding your creativity with books. You have to read, even if you can’t read your drug of choice.
