The Curse of the Professional

Any time you become a professional at something, your perception of that something is forever and unutterably altered. The something you once enjoyed as an amateur is now your job - you've staked your financial solvency on mastering your particular something. Therefore, in the pursuit of your ten thousand hours, if you buy author Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that any task requires that much practice to produce mastery, you analyze. You analyze others. You analyze yourself. And the pasttime that once gave you so much enjoyment and relaxation is now work. Hard work.

Thus it is with reading fiction for me. Movies, TV shows, and plays are the same. This is because I'm a slow learner, you see. I went to acting school, thereby destroying my ability to get lost in a show of any kind, ever again. Except Cirque du Soleil. No hope I could do what those performers do. So I'm free to sit back and be carried away by the show.

For the longest time, I wrote stories without sacrificing my ability to get lost in someone else's prose. In fact, thinking back, it wasn't until I was writing to deadlines that I realized I HAD to stop reading fiction while I was drafting. If I didn't, I ended up sounding like whoever I was reading. Not good. It was also about that time that I realized that *while* I was in the middle of reading a novel, everything was fine. But after I closed the back cover? All hell would break loose in my head. Analyzing. Re-analyzing. Comparing how the author I'd just read handled x issue to how I dealt with a similiar issue in my work. Depending on where I was in the process of getting a WIP on paper, someone else's novel (particularly really good ones) could paralyze me for days and days, because just look at how fabulous the story is! I could never do that well! Why can't I write like that? Waa, waa, waa.

So I stopped. No more fiction while I'm drafting. I'm too neurotic and fragile while getting down the bones of a story. Don't like it, but there it is. I'm trying to deal with what is. And, frankly, I can't afford a few days of second-guessing paralysis. So I reserve all of the tasty novels I want to devour for rewriting, editing, and copy-editing times. While I'm drafting, I read science. It's not news to anyone here that I have a potentially unhealthy addiction to science-y nonfiction. Hard science, psychology, sociology - it's all interesting to me. It's all interesting because it's all potential story fodder. Which is, yes, an admission that I've changed how I read those books, too, I guess. I take notes. I underline. I dog-ear pages. Put down the pitchfork. I only do that to books I own. And now that we're talking about Kindle editions, I'm satisfied with bookmarks and digital underlines. Anything so I can find the tidbits that piqued my storybrain's interest.

Thing is, even though I'm underlining and bookmarking, I'm at my ease reading these books. I get sucked in and pulled along until a bit of information or an idea arrests me - but even that's vastly enjoyable. I'm relaxed. I'm happy. And I feel like I might be learning something worth knowing. Sure. Occassionally, I hit upon a 'science' book that is unintentionally comedic because of the sensationalist tone or the plainly bad science. The book upon which "The Day After Tomorrow" was based leaps to mind...

When I'm done with my rough draft, out come the novels. I fill up on other people's words and characters and plots. For some reason, once I'm rewriting, I'm far less prone to second-guessing. I might still lament that I'll never write as beautifully as some of my favorite authors, but at least I'm not paralyzed with self-doubt. Usually.

Read'em and Weep

by Allison Pang

Like so many of my fellow word whores, I also find that I have less time to read - but then, I seem to have a lot less time for a lot of things. Gone are the days where I might play WoW until my eyes bled. Or stayed up all night to devour an 800 page book. Or spent all weekend cross-stitching.

Or hell, even sleeping in. Which hasn't happened for at least nine years now. >_<  Silly children.

It's not something I'd really thought about when I was trying to get published, but writing tends to suck up a good deal of my free time, so when I do read books I want them to be worth my time. So now I'm much more picky. Before all this, I nearly always finished every book I started - I guess I felt that I owed it to the author to see it through to the end. But these days, if it doesn't strike my fancy I put it down and move on to something else.

The problem is that after spending so much time going over my own work and trying to improve my craft, it's hard to shut down that "editor brain" even when I read for fun. It's a bit of a bummer really. Part of it is nitpicking on things, but part of is is because now I *know* how much work and love goes into crafting a story - it's hard not to simply stop and appreciate a lovely turn of phrase or scene that truly transports or wince when I come across something that doesn't work.

Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures, so it's wonderful when I come across a book that I can forget the work that goes behind it. I think in some ways it becomes a measure of trust - I have a list of authors or book series that I trust - e.g. I know if I pick up a book by one of them, I will be satisfied.

(Which is why it becomes so hard when an author or series suddenly seems to take a sharp right-hand turn into nowhere - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That trust can become bitter disappointment.)

These days I have books I read to feed my craft - highlighting bits and pieces or even certain words or scenes that strike my fancy that I want to remember - and books that are my comfort. When I look past the craft of the words and fall into the story like I used to? That's become rather precious to me because it doesn't happen as often as it used to. Things I could easily have overlooked before become glaring problems that pull me straight out of the story.

And of course, I realize that other people probably do the same thing with my books - which is both cool and somewhat mortifying all at once. And it's one of the reasons I can't really read my own books after they're out - the cool parts are cool, but wow, seeing the mistakes I made and can no longer change are often groan-inducing.

But that's only fair, isn't it? :)

The Death of the Obsessive Reader

I need books that make me think lest my brain go to rot.

Give me words I have to research and settings to stretch my imagination.

Characters ought to fill my dreams long after I have finished the story.

Plots should be complex and threads resolved by tale's end.

I am a close-reader. Every word. Every mark of punctuation. Every twist of phrase.

Opening a book is a commitment to the author.
I never skim.
I never skip.

I take my time to enjoy the experience.

That is the kind of reader I have always been and continue to be.

What changed once I became a writer? 

I have higher expectations of the books I read. The stories to which I give my time and attention teach me something about my craft -- very much like James mentioned yesterday. I read a book once for the joy of the story and again to dissect the artistry. I verbally summarize what I've read, making notes about which parts of the story stayed with me and why they did. Post-It notes mark passages where the author succeeded in something at which I am struggling (how/when a cast of dozens is introduced, for example).

The dissection for the sake of craft, the time taken to learn from good examples, and the application of the newly-found knowledge to a WiP seriously cut back on the number of books I read. My pre-author book consumption was five books/week. I know I'm not a fast reader but I was a dedicated one. I'm not a fast writer either, but the dedication to stories remains.

There are styles of writing I can no longer tolerate; head-hopping being of particular note. I notice things now I didn't before: pandering to trends, formulaic plots, and disturbingly similar stories by different authors.

I take greater umbrage when encountering dreck. I hold publishers more accountable for failing the consumer. The surfeit of supply is legend. No P&L is improved by pushing crap on the public. Speaking of crap, I despise industry undercurrents to dumb things down. It is pervasive in certain genres. I resent a book from which "dullard" bleeds from every page. There are publishers whose books I will not buy because their business strategy assumes I have nothing more than a third-grade reading level.

I hold self-published books to the same standards as those printed by a publishing house. Anyone can write a book. Not everyone should inflict that book on the world. I view poorly written books and authors who chose to put those books on the market as cautionary tales. I study the hell out of the self-published books and authors who "succeed" in "my" genres. Again, they have something to teach me.

Becoming a writer changed the way I read by changing what I learn from a book. What started eons ago as history and vocabulary lessons embedded in spectacular storytelling has evolved into lessons on how to write spectacular stories.

I may not read as obsessively as I once did, but now I'm getting more from each book.

What about you, dear reader? For what do you read?

How Reading as a Writer Is Different

This is our younger cat, Jackson, chewing on my wind chimes. You'll note the lengths he went to, to get to them.

I feel this way about books - can't wait to get them and then I chew them up.

With a book I love, I savor every bite, swallowing it down and carrying that warm, full feeling. Other books, I just chew and chew, masticating over why I don't like them - why some aspect is failing to work for me.

It's a curse, I tell you.

No, really.

This week's topic (suggested by one of my bordello mates, though a trigger one for me) is Reading Books as Writers: Do you read differently & close-reading techniques. See, I've always been a close reader. I'm blessed with an ability to concentrate that lets me shut out the rest of the world to focus on only what I'm doing and nothing else. This is a trait that annoyed my mother no end when I was a kid. But, over the course of my life, it's turned out to be a useful quality. My superpower, if you will. Hey, I can't rescue schoolchildren from perilously perched buses, but I test well.

It's something.

So, I'm one of those readers who pays a lot of attention. My early academic training has me following themes and symbolism, enjoying the layers the author weaves in. I love a puzzle of a story, assembling the various clues and inconsistencies. Unreliable narrators rock my little reader world. Nothing better than a writer who leaves a trail of bread crumbs and delivers a loaf of bread at the end.

However, this means I notice inconsistencies, too. When I was twelve, I made a list of mistakes and slips in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. I had this whole plan to send her a helpful letter, pointing them out. Now I'm glad I never did. Back then I didn't know they'd only annoy her, as writers have no way to fix published books.

I think this also makes me a good critique partner - or a really annoying one.

But, to answer the question of whether I read differently as a writer?

Yes. Yes, I do. And let me tell you - it's kind of a bummer.

So much of my mind now is geared to process the craft of writing, from point-of-view changes to scene structure to word choice to character arc, that I can't seem to entirely turn it off. Gone are the days when I could just enjoy a book for what it was. I'm always making mental notes, the critique part of my mind making little pencil-on-paper noises even after I've told it to shut up. I can kind of turn-it down, but if I start to wonder why something isn't working for me, that part of my brain promptly provides a list.

On the flip side, if I find a book that really does work for me, I am over the moon.

Still, there's one more aspect of being a writer that I believe may have forever diminished my joy in reading. It's a dirty little secret of fiction-writing that no author I've seen confesses to.

(Or, it's entirely possible that it's just me and now everyone will point and laugh.)

See, now that I'm writing my own stories - the ones like the kind I best loved to read - it's really super fun. Way more fun than I ever suspected it would be. It wasn't like this when I wrote nonfiction. But when I write a fiction piece, I get all wrapped up in the world and characters in the exact same way I used to as a reader. It's all the same transportive wonder and thrill - ONLY BETTER.

Yeah, that's right.

It's like I've found the über-drug and now nothing else gets me quite as high. Oh, I'll dabble in the others, especially for the social aspect. But when I need to mainline, I know where to find it.

Just leave me in my corner and walk away quietly.

Nothing to see here, folks.