Writing vs Reading
It shouldn’t be writing vs reading, but it is for me. I haven’t read all that many books since writing has taken over my creative life. Most of my wall of books I acquired prior to 2000, and I haven't purchased or read all that many books since.
I suspect that this isn’t the case for most writers. Most writers read a lot of books even while they are writing. Nathan Lowell said in a recent blog post “Reading is a necessary key to writing for me. Over the years I’ve learned that if I’m not writing, I’m probably not reading.” And I know of other authors – indeed all of the ones I know, who can both read books and write books, walk and chew gum, at the same time. But for me, it doesn’t work that way. Oh, I can read and write, but I have to say that over the last decade of writing, I don't feel the need to read books.
There are several reasons for this. One simple one is that I couldn’t find new books that I enjoyed reading. This fact was one of the motivating factors for me to get serious about writing my own books. This is due, in part because over the years I’ve developed a very narrow taste in stories, stories that, for the most part, they don’t write anymore, at least not in the way I enjoy. I've long considered myself a fan of science fiction. The reality is that I read mostly space operas and planetary romances. They don’t write planetary romances these days, and space operas are, for the most part, military sf stories. Plus, I find that many of them are thinly disguised fan fiction of TV shows and movies on one end of the scale, and on the other end, massive techno-jargon epics on a vast scale, with few, character focused stories in between, which would be my sweet spot.
My major problem with modern fiction is that I hate the modern fad of telling stories with multiple points of view, and lots of them. I also dislike multiple flashbacks as well. When I pick up a book, I want to read a narrative, not put together a jigsaw puzzle in words. All this slicing and dicing makes me suspect that the story is seen as simply too plain to tell without artificially making it complicated and confusing. So, given my limited tastes and current fads, it’s not surprising that I have a hard time finding modern books that I really enjoy reading.
The other factor keeping me from reading books, is that I spend a lot of time, ideally, anyway, daydreaming up my stories and I don’t want other stories seeping into those daydreams. I use the time I might spend reading daydream up my story, scene by scene throughout the day and when I wake up at night. I go over and over them again slightly altering them until I’m satisfied. And even then, I will probably make minor changes when I set them to words.
All that said, I am hoping to read more this year. I’ve already posted a number of book reviews, and I just tried and DNF’ed two more books: Mike Brooks’ Dark Run at the 24% point – I didn’t care about the characters and I found it to be too much of a Firefly fan fic. The other was Peter F Hamilton’s Great Northern Road at the 10% point. The Hamilton story was about the polar opposite of Dark Run, with way too many points of view characters, way too many minor scenes that ran way too long. I found myself skimming whole pages, and with 800+ to go I decided not to go on. I have a couple more books on order from the library. We’ll see if I can find one I like.
In the meanwhile, I am daydreaming up a new story. Don’t hold your breath, however. I had started two writing projects this fall, the sequel to Keiree, and another Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure story. But in both instances, I ran out of story ideas and lost interest in them. The thing is that I really want to write a longer, more ambitious work. I spent all summer fruitlessly thinking about and daydreaming one up, but I couldn’t get a story out of it. What I’ve done now is combined the world I created this summer with a plot from another failed story idea, and I think I might be able to get this hybrid idea to work. I have a lot of daydreaming to go, but since I’m enjoying my daydreaming. It’s not work. I don’t want to work. However, I’m in no rush to get it written. I won’t put it into words until I have the story solidly entirely “written” in my head. I don’t want to have to stop in the middle of the story to invent what I want to do next as I have been doing in the last several books. So, if everything goes well, and that’s far from a given, any book that comes out of this certainly wouldn’t be ready for release until late fall 2022 at the very earliest, but it may well end up being my 2023 novel. I want it to be good. I want it to be my best. I am going to take my time with it.
