Reading, writing and being human.
With all the different forms of entertainment at our fingertips, it seems that this generation, on the whole, have given books a wide berth. There have been some periods of renaissance where books and reading have become popular again in the public consciousness: the popularity of the Harry Potter series, for example. However, there are still a good number of people in the world who love to relax, take stock of their busy lives, and dive into a good book.
Paradoxically, I want to talk to those people who have given up on reading the vast wealth of stories that come up every day from authors who just have a tale to tell, and let them know that the experience of reading a book, either in its physically form or as an e-book, is for everyone, and can be more enjoyable than every other medium that bombards us every minute of every day. The paradox being that those people I want to reach will probably not be inclined to read my blog in the first place.
I used to be just like them. Growing up, I found reading kind of boring. Books were long, my eyes got tired when I read, there were other things vying for my attention, etc. However, I realised that the reason that the other forms of entertainment were so addictive (for want of a better word) was because they were just short bursts of stimulus that required more bursts to remain satisfied. Books, on the other hand, could provide that stimulus over a longer period of time, and in the end be more satisfying.
Books, in whatever way we consume them, inspire us in ways other forms of entertainment can rarely accomplish. When we read, we use our imaginations to bring to life the words we absorb. We tell ourselves what a character looks like from the bare description on the page, how their action appear to us, what they sound like when they talk. We become part of the creative process with the author in bringing the book to life. It maybe why when a book has been adapted for either the big or small screen, we can be disappointed at the result because it wasn’t exactly as we pictured it. There’s a saying we continually hear when we talk about these adaptations, “The book was better”. That’s because, no matter how high a budget a film has, or how good an actor is, they can never compete with our own imagination. Our imagination has no limits. And that is why all of us should spend at least some of our time with our noses between the pages of a book, facing the screens of our e-readers, or listening to an audio book, and enjoy the ride we ourselves help form.
I write because I need to create, it’s a part of me, to tell a story that I hope entertains, but most of all allows my imagination to expand from inside myself to the outside world. I feel that our imagination is the thing that really gives us our humanity, and sharing our imagination, either by writing the stories within us or reading the stories of others, makes us truly human.
