In Others’ Words: No Shortcuts

I’ve wanted to be a writer all my life. Really. I was one of those kids in school who didn’t moan about writing papers for English class and who thought spelling bees were fun. When it came time to choose my major for college, I asked myself, “What do I love enough that I wouldn’t mind doing it every day for the rest of my life?”

The answer: writing.

So I majored in journalism — and never once thought of switching to something else.

Marriage and motherhood put writing on the backburner for a lot of years — and I have no regrets about that. But when I decided to step back onto the writing road more than a decade ago, I learned I had a lot of hard work to do to scrape the rust off my journalism degree — and my writing skills.

It’s a good thing I think rewriting is fun.

The one area I struggle in is keeping on my reading — reading a book just for the fun of it. Despite owning a Kindle, I still have To Be Read piles scattered around my house (my apologies to my husband who thought the Kindle purchase would solve that problem) — and I have hundreds of unread books loaded onto my e-reader too.

But if Larry L. King is right — and I think he is — to be a better writer I need to be reading   more. Novels. Books on the writing craft. Non-fiction books. The Word.

The question is always: How?

In Your Words: So, friends, in the midst of your busy lives — all the doing and the deadlines and the writing and rewriting: How do you find time to read? And what are you reading right now?