Driven to Read; Driven to Write

I have a confession:  I have a lot of books.  It feels like I have always had a lot of books.

Most of the ones I grew up with were inherited.  Many had stained cloth covers or pictures of perfectly groomed girls who went to boarding schools, but I read and re-read them all.  I was an indiscriminate reader, as happy with the stories in the Arthur Mee encyclopedias as I was with my ladybird books, Enid Blyton, Georgette Heyer or the pulp fiction I bought at jumble sales.

As soon as it became known that I was ‘a reader’ books flowed into my life.  They did not just arrive for Christmas or my birthday, I became a drop off point for unwanted volumes.  These were usually dusty, with damage to the cover or fly-leaf.  My main supplier was my Grandfather, who trawled junk shops and auctions for bargains.  In this way, I began to build a substantial and varied library.

Luckily, my parents saw this as a good thing.  They supplied me with extra shelves as required, and so, despite occasional suggestions that I might have outgrown Dick and Jane books, my collection grew.  I waded through dense Victorian novels as enthusiastically as I gorged on fairy tales, and stacked them all neatly into my wall of books.

If a story had hooked me I carried that book about.  When it was really good I read under the desk during lessons; on the school bus (despite my motion sickness) and as I walked around.  Most of those books I forgot soon after starting the next one, but some were powerful. Robinson Crusoe was read amongst the daisies on the lawn and Lorna Doone belongs to a wet autumn afternoon curled up in the armchair.  I could list more.

I held onto those books for a long time, because for a long time my love of stories was confused with my enjoyment of the object.  I liked turning the page.  There were qualities to admire, even in the cheapest editions.  Tissue thin pages and tiny print meant a substantial story; pages as thick as blotting paper with large heavy lettering meant a quick read.  Remember, I did say I was an indiscriminate reader.

All of this reading was certainly connected with my secret desire to write, but as my teachers observed, being a ‘good reader’ did not improve my spelling, punctuation or grammar.  Instead, I was an excellent day-dreamer and a poor scholar.  Of course, my teachers had no idea I had a secret ambition.  Schools teach us to read for meaning, and that is a broad and sensible ambition for the majority.  I left school with a faint feeling that something had been missed out.

I continued to expand my library, but my writing stumbled.  It took more than one creative writing course for me to understand that I had been taught how to read as a reader, when I needed to read as a writer.  I resisted knowing it.  I was good at reading, and I liked writing stories, so how could reading possibly be my problem.

Someone had the answers, and I hoped they had written a book.

Writing Blocks – strategy 1

So I’ve had this blog site for five months and, apart from some occasional fragments about gardening, all I’ve really done is make lists and dither about creating suitable content.  Of course, I have all sorts of great excuses to justify this inactivity, but I logged on this morning because I have now admitted to myself that all my reasons for not writing this blog have been exactly what I warn my students about: displacement activities.

Okay, so I haven’t been washing the kitchen floor rather than write this (though I do keep the house clean, honest), or tidying my bookshelves, but I have invented a whole raft of reasonable excuses, and what they come to, is fear.

They are, of course, the same fears that inhibit most writers at some point:

1. What can I write about that has not been written before?
2. Why would anyone want to read about what I think?

I tell my students that they have to develop strategies to get around that kind of thinking or nothing would ever get written.  ‘If you don’t write it,’ I say, ‘someone else will.  Not in the way you would have done, but someone will do something so close to it that it will feel like they stole your idea.’

They say, ‘That’s all very well, but what if I’m not good enough?’

I tell them, ‘You’ll never know if you don’t try, so I’m going to help you put that first word on the page.’

Then I set them an anti-displacement activity exercise.

One of them goes like this:

• Read this list of well-used displacement activities.

Washing up

Walking the dog

Cleaning the car

Tidying the room

Mowing the lawn

Cleaning the windows

• It is a terrible list, isn’t it?  But this is how far some of us will go to avoid writing.  If we let this kind of thinking get a hold on us we will soon have immaculate households, but have nothing written down.
• How strong are these excuses really?  It can be tough making time to write.
• Displacement activities are habits, just like smoking or chocolate.  All we have to do is break our habit.
• It can be difficult to break habits, ask a smoker, so we’re going to use some lateral thinking.
• Look at the list again and find an activity that would not naturally occur to you.  Write it at the top of your page.
• It is now your major barrier to writing, so create a strategy to side-step it. This is an opportunity to take a creative approach.   Think laterally and write a full page response to this problem.

I like this exercise.

But it occurs to me that in passing this exercise on now I have just completed a displacement activity of my own, as my intention when I switched on the computer was to complete the story I have been working on.  So, maybe all activities could be counted as displacements.

I’m sure there is something you should be doing instead of reading this.