Writing – The Craft of

The Act of Reading

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

I just came across an interesting question.

Has the act of reading made a difference in your life?

Well, I don’t know if the actual act of reading has, other than it limits physical activity because I can’t read and walk at the same time.

But has reading made a difference in my life?

For me, that’s an obvious yes. I wouldn’t write if I didn’t read. I wouldn’t daydream, that’s for sure. Who knows what kind of adult I’d be if I hadn’t spent so much of my younger years either deep in a book, or deep in an imaginary story. That added up to a lot of solitude.

It reminds me of the time I sat on my bed, crying, because the siblings were outside playing basketball and hadn’t asked me. My mom sat next to me and said, ‘well, would you have gone if they asked you?’ My response was a dramatic ‘No, but I still wanted to be asked!’. No, I wouldn’t have gone outside and played basketball because the blank paper and the sharpened pencil waited. Symbols of those wonderful imaginary worlds.

There’s the obvious positive outcomes of early reading. A lot has been written about how that impacts brain development, confidence, etc., but this has me wondering about the less obvious impacts. No so much physical brain development, but the emotional.

I can’t remember how old I was when I started reading, but I do clearly remember how old I was when I started telling stories, and even the first story, and my awareness of the power of storytelling. So for me, that came before reading, and I assume reading just enhanced the desire to tell more stories. And I definitely became someone for whom the story world in books was more real than what was going on at school or at home. I wonder if I would have read so much if I hadn’t first discovered stories. Sounds like an ‘egg before the chicken’ type of question.

The question fascinates me because I find I can’t imagine not reading. How do you separate reading, and stories, from who you are? I can’t.  Maybe the actual question is, who would you be if you didn’t read?

 

Reviews

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

Book reviews are gold for authors. I’m tempted to stand on a street corner with a cardboard sign that says ‘Bought my book? Please write a review’.  It’s free advertising after all. But did you know that there are whole websites devoted to reviewing books? Well, with the internet, of course there is. Writers can submit their books for online reviews, which obviously can increase, or crash, sales. I just finished reading a blog post by Molly Greene (www.molly-greene.com) about book reviewers. As always, with Ms. Greene’s blog posts, I found it interesting and informative. There was a list of things not to do when approaching a book reviewer.

Things like no mass mailing, researching their website first to make sure it’s a fit, being professional, etc.

And you know what this is? The modern-day version of sending out query letters to traditional agents and publishers. I remember those days not-so-fondly. The Writer’s Market annual guide to agents and publishers, a huge heavy book with all the listings. Going through it with a highlighter marking all the ones that accepted mysteries by unpublished authors. Then researching them to find out if my mystery fit their wish list and making sure they were legitimate. Then agonizing over the perfect query letter, mailing it out, and waiting weeks for the rejection letter.

Interestingly, one thing I learned from that process was that there are degrees of rejection. In the beginning I got form letters. Once I even got my self-addressed, stamped envelope returned, with nothing inside, and simply the words ‘no thanks’ scrawled across the back of the envelope. But hey, it was hand written! Then I improved to where I got personalized rejections with things like, ‘this may not be for us, but send us your next one’. Talk about excitement when that one arrived.

But I digress.

What is obvious is that the work stays the same, no matter what the medium. Whether I’m sending out stamped envelopes or hitting the ‘send’ button, some things never change. Research. Professionalism. Being polite. Knowing your market. Knowing your product, etc. Which, in many ways, is true within all walks of live. Respect for all things.

It’s kind of reassuring, in these days of computer programs I flounder with, that there’s something I recognize from the ‘old days’. I don’t need my teenager to explain this to me. I just need to do some research. Been there, done that, can do it again.

Art

/ Lisa / 9 Comments

Sorry friends, this isn’t a story about something my husband, Art, has been up to.

A teenage girl was given a homework assignment to interview artists with a specific list of questions. Her teacher said to choose a ‘traditional’ artist, and then someone who others might not think of as an artist. She called me today and asked me if she could interview me, as she thinks writers are artists. Well, of course I said yes, and was very flattered.

Let me tell you, she asked some hard questions. Like, ‘what is art’, and ‘is art vital to society’. But oddly, the one that stumped me and had me floundering for a few moments was this: ‘how do you make art’.

From the writing standpoint this could almost be a variation on the cliché question of ‘where do your ideas come from’. But it’s not. Or at least, it wasn’t to me. At first I said that I don’t ‘make’ art, that it’s more like stories come from somewhere ‘out there’ and flow through the writer. Which sounded too out there for the conversation.

Then I realized that what hung me up on the question was the word ‘make’. Is anyone surprised that a writer would get hung up on a single word? Well, what made that word difficult for me was that it implied ownership. That I had some sort of right to art, or control over it. Yes, of course, the artist has a measure of control over their work. But stories don’t belong to me. Which is why we write, to share them, to free them, to let others hear them. (And I sure can’t make them do what I want…)

So in that sense, I don’t think you can make art.

She also asked me what I got from art. That was an easy one to answer. Freedom. Complete, total freedom. To create any world I want to be in, to create people I want to spend time with, or even create people who scare me. To change a story with an ending that didn’t give me what I wanted, or to create an ending where none existed. To answer questions and ask questions.

A final question was if one medium of art impacted another. That one, too, was easy. Music has always impacted my writing and always will.

But I keep going back to that one question. How do you make art?

How do you answer that?

Nature as art

Nature as art