Recovering From A Reading Drought
Occasionally I have a reading drought and I am glad it is a rare occurrence. It nearly always happens when I'm over-tired or stressed etc and it just means I can't face reading anything for a while. I'm just getting over one now (and by something that is definitely not a coincidence, it started a week or so into lockdown here in the UK).
Now this is not the usual me by any means. I DO read all the notices on the fish and chip shop walls (when we're allowed to go back there) and yes I read the back of the cornflakes packet eons ago!
I've learned just to bear with this drought because I know it will pass and it is only temporary. How do I get out of it again?
I turn to humorous prose, which is one of my great loves anyway. It rarely fails to cheer me and, once I've started reading again, the lure of books keeps me hooked, which is what I want of course.
I've had no problem writing during this lockdown. I do wonder if it is my subsconcious telling me "you can do one creative activity, Madam, but you're not doing two!"
Any thoughts on how to tell my subsconcious to shut up and leave me alone so I can carry on reading would be welcomed!
Now this is not the usual me by any means. I DO read all the notices on the fish and chip shop walls (when we're allowed to go back there) and yes I read the back of the cornflakes packet eons ago!
I've learned just to bear with this drought because I know it will pass and it is only temporary. How do I get out of it again?
I turn to humorous prose, which is one of my great loves anyway. It rarely fails to cheer me and, once I've started reading again, the lure of books keeps me hooked, which is what I want of course.
I've had no problem writing during this lockdown. I do wonder if it is my subsconcious telling me "you can do one creative activity, Madam, but you're not doing two!"
Any thoughts on how to tell my subsconcious to shut up and leave me alone so I can carry on reading would be welcomed!
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Gill
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Jun 02, 2020 09:12AM
I wonder .... I used to read at every opportunity e.g. like when traveling on public transport but then I found I was missing a good opportunity to people watch. If people watching became boring there was always the phone and Twitter / Facebook etc. Now, it's harder to people watch. So perhaps we don't need the fiction to explain what we're seeing in the people. OR, in my case, I'm finding even the most dramatic fiction tame compared with real life. However, this odd life is becoming the new normal so the ficiton's getting interesting again.
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Now that's an interesting thought, Gill, and one that hadn't occurred to me. I think in my case I am ready to "escape" into fiction again and that is what is helping me now. Diet of humorous prose and short story/flash fiction collections for me at the moment. Always useful for whetting the reading appetite again. I tend to write when travelling by train now and love that. (I get loads done!). People watching for me is now more a case of when I can get to a coffee shop/cafe. I suspect every writer in the country is longing for the coffee shops to reopen for this reason alone!
