Writers as Readers

When I write, I need to be somewhere relaxing. Usually, I’m sitting on my bed when I write, but sometimes if the house is quiet, I’ll move into the living room and sit on the couch. If there’s too much noise, I can’t keep my focus at all. If the TV is on… I end up watching it, and doing my writing on commercials. It’s not the best strategy to write, but at least it still gets done. Writing in classrooms can be difficult, it’s quiet, but not always that comfortable of a place to get something done.

I wouldn’t say I prefer one genre over another, as long as it keeps my attention. I know some books like Harry Potter won’t interest me, just because I have no fascination with magic or British people. Not saying they’re bad books, but I couldn’t imagine sitting down to read a book that’s inches thick about something I don’t care about, similar to a history or chemistry book. One “genre”, that interests me, if it’s even a genre, is the dystopian societies. Books like the Hunger Games -which I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did- really kept me drawn in because of the storyline that can be weaved in with the dystopia. It’s just interesting to see how life would function if we lived in a different world.

Like in my last post, the Hunger Games is the only book in recent memory that was a real page turner. I got the first book done in about a week and a half, I liked it, and decided to read the next book. I bought it, and finished it in a day and a half, then went to the third book, and finished it in about the same time. I can usually bring myself to reading a book all the way, even if I’m not interested, but some books do the opposite. I feel bad saying it, but Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were two of the books that I really couldn’t bring myself to reading without a lot of will power. If the language was different, and maybe the setting, I could do it, but that would end up just ruining the book.

I think books have to power to make people see things in a different light, in a way they wouldn’t have looked at before, and I would say they can make people interested in things they’ve never thought of, but not until they’ve actually read it. I haven’t read Harry Potter, but I don’t think the author wrote it for the purpose of starting some big debate about the occult. Some people like to find a problem where a problem really doesn’t exist. Even if some people did see it as a problem, they’re not fixing it by putting it out in the open like they did, I would think doing that would make more people go away from the message they want to put out.

I don’t write with the reader in mind, I write what I think, and leave it to the people to decide if they like what I wrote. If they did, they stay, if they didn’t, they leave. But an actual author would probably need to tailor it to the reader. A children’s author shouldn’t be using long complicated words from Shakespeare, and an adult novel writer shouldn’t be writing like Dr. Seuss. I suppose it comes down to what you intend to write. Some books can span all ages, interesting people young and old, sometimes with the intention of only getting one type of people.

I think many of the best writers are people who read often. They know the style they want to pursue, how to arrange words in an order that is pleasing to hear, they have a stronger vocabulary to add more emotion to their piece. People who read often can see the patterns that make a good book. They’ve read so many books, they can take bits and pieces of one book, with pieces of several others, and create a book unlike any other book out there. They know how to place different pieces in to make it something memorable.