Easy writer reader6/30/2023 ![]() Y.C.: He should have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, by Tolstoi, Midshipman Easy, Frank Mildamay and Peter Simple by Captain Marryat, Madame Bovary and LʼEducation Sentimentale by Flaubert, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Joyceʼs Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Fielding, Le Rouge et le Noire and La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, The Brothers Karamazov and any two other Dostoevskis, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane, Hail and Farewell by George Moore, Yeats Autobiographies, all the good De Maupassant, all the good Kipling, all of Turgenev, Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. ![]() : He should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat. Mice: What books should a writer have to read? This entertaining excerpt appears in Hemingway on Writing. In an article Hemingway wrote for Esquire in 1935, he recounts the advice he gave an aspiring writer known as Maestro, Mice for short. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy – “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand” – but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of beautiful characters, and truth-telling. One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose – one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lectures thrown in. ![]() Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. While that may be true as a general rule, King talks about the role badly-written books played in teaching him to write.Īsteroid Miners (which wasn’t the title, but that’s close enough) was an important book in my life as a reader. Schopenhauer said “one can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison they destroy the mind.” The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order. Yet there is a learning process going on. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. I don’t read in order to study the craft I read because I like to read. I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. There’s no way around those two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King explains why reading is so important for those who want to write. Speaking with the wisdom of experience, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace share their thoughts on the relationship between reading and writing. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. As Anne Lamott points out, the converse is also true – writing makes you a better reader. Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. During the Q&A for How to Read a Book, someone asked whether reading a lot makes us better writers.
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