Why Writers Read: Thoughts on Creativity and Craft

OK, so this may sound silly. Of course, writers need to read, and they do. It’s what they get out of reading that has me thinking. As I’ve gotten more serious about my own writing, and been inspired by examples from writing classes, I’ve returned to reading more serious writers. Studying that kind of literary writing, the best examples of the craft, must be helpful to my own, right? Well, in some respects, but maybe not as much as I’d hoped.

The thing about craft study and writing classes is that, while they challenge you how to better express and dramatize what you have to say, and in that respect, they’re invaluable, they make the process of writing much harder. While I hope that I will come out the other end a much better writer, they do put a lot of stuff in your head that can be paralyzing. Many of my fellow students have had the same experience, and it’s made me think more about the process.

Reading, and studying writing, only touches on a part of what it takes to write. As in any other art, it touches the craft part of the process, which is obviously critical. The most important part, though, the part that drives a writer’s appeal to readers, is wholly different. That part involves what you have to say, what’s unique to you as a writer. That part doesn’t come from classes, nor does it come from reading the writing of others, however brilliant and well-executed it is. That writing may inspire us in a variety of ways, but what we want to write, the subject matter, what we have to say, that has to come from who we are, what we’ve experienced, and what we believe to be true. I would even add that the creative approach, how we want to say what we have to say, that half of that comes from somewhere else other than craft.

That’s why so many of the writing classes I’ve taken, mostly at Grub Street, while they held definite value for me, ended up feeling wrong in some basic way. I have only found a couple of instructors so far who I felt had sufficient respect for each individual writer’s vision. They were careful to honor it, and didn’t feel it necessary to mess with it in service to their sense of the rules of craft. Others would take a sliver of work from a writer in class and pick it apart without any sense for that writer’s vision—a sliver is inadequate to convey a sense of that. While their feedback was not unhelpful from a craft perspective, it didn’t respect the line I have come to believe is there, and important to recognize.

I read in a blog post somewhere recently that readers are attracted to a writer by what that person has to say, by their unique ideas and vision, and will often forgive sloppy craft, viewing it as unimportant. The point this particular writer was making was that, in order to support yourself as a writer, it is unproductive to spend too much time in rewrite and more important to get your stuff out there. While these were primarily self-published, indie writers he was speaking to, the publishing industry that has reduced its investment in editing has embraced the principle as well. While I think it’s unfortunate in many respects that writers who, unlike myself, are trying to make a living at it, are choosing quantity over quality, I think the point about readers rings true. Fifty Shades of Gray and The DaVinci Code are excellent examples of very attractive (to many people at least) content overwhelming mediocre writing. My own experience in reading the writing of many well-respected writing teachers is that their craft work is lovely, but they have little to say that interests me.

People become writers because they have something to say. The challenge for any writer is to use craft to communicate with readers, but that only happens after you figure out, or rather, summon up, what you have to say. Contrary to the genre plot formula gurus, you need a story first, about interesting people, doing stuff that ultimately gets to something you believe strongly to be true, even if that something isn’t something you can put your finger on, because it’s something you just feel. The rest gets tweaked in rewrite. And the danger seems to be getting dragged down or lost in craft imperatives—where’s my character arc, my mirror moment, what does my character want in this scene, is it boring—to the point that what you want to say gets drowned out by those other voices in your head.

In some ways, reading the work of other writers, while inspiring, can be a distraction in much the same way. Writers need to stay focused on what they have to say, on the people and stories that grow out of who they are and how they’ve lived. Their imaginations need to be bound to their own cores, and their stories have to spring from there. I think that’s what Tim Weed, my favorite writing teacher, means when he talks about the dangers of workshopping and writing by committee. It’s why we need to go off by ourselves and come up with the story before we begin the process of feedback and rewrite. We need to get away from the noise, so we can hear ourselves think, feel and dream.

After drafting this, I went on the blog of a friend, David Rosenbaum, and found a blog by the successor director to the founder of TED talks, whose name is Chris Anderson. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-ted-might-have-died-chris-anderson. This is what he says, at the end of his piece: “Your number one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners. The only thing that truly matters in public speaking is not confidence, stage presence or smooth talking. It’s having something worth saying.” Regarding fiction writing, that’s what I’m talking about.