I love reading.
But I can just remember a time when I couldn’t read. I was two and my mother had a picture in the bathroom. It contained a children’s nursery rhyme about cleaning up the bathroom. And after the bath, she’d point to it and read it and say, now you can’t leave the bathroom before you clean it up. So we’d put the toys away and hang up the bathmat.
I hated that picture because it had power over me and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t see where the power came from.
I started school at four and I don’t remember learning to read. It was the time of Dick and Dora and their dog Spot. (See Spot run. See Dick run. See Dora run. Riveting stuff). I remember being pages ahead of the class because listening to them read was painful. When it came to my turn I had no idea where they were and the teacher thought I couldn’t read.
So reading is like breathing to me. I can’t help it. Conversely coming up with stories is also like breathing. There have always been stories in my head. I’d pester my poor grandfather for stories. And wonder why he couldn’t come up with dozens of them. His stories tended to be practical snippets like. You grab a snake behind the head real quick, and crack him like a whip to break his back. Grandfather was from the bush.
When I had my secondhand bookshop I’d read a book before lunch, a book after lunch and a book after dinner. (This was in the days when books were 60,000 words). Soon I’d read every book that interested me in my shop. I’d prowl the shelves searching for anything that piqued my interest. When ever someone bought in books to sell I’d put aside any that I found interesting and devour them.
But before long there were days when I could not find anything to read. Or I would start books and get annoyed with them. So I just had to write to feed my reading habit. That’s how I started writing.
Are all dedicated readers aspiring writers? Over at the ROR blog the Sunday Writing Craft post is a Checklist for Aspiring Writers.
I suppose it is different now that we can buy the DVD of our choice, surf the net and play computer games. But sometimes, only a book will do. What do you do when you can’t find a book to read?
I completely agree – in fact I have the exact same memory regarding reading in class at a young age; I suspect it’s something a great many of us (by us I mean, the aspiring/inspiring writers) experienced.
I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t, and didn’t read. My mum still has a Dorling/Kindersley encyclopedia that I had when I was small which I used to read if I had nothing else to hand – just open a page and read about whatever was there. Nowadays, it’s a bit more difficult than that (I don’t own an encyclopedia).
If I have nothing at all to read – well, that’s never happened, thanks to the rapidly-expanding bookshelf of my housemate. But there are times when I don’t want to read, as shocking as it might seem – when you don’t have the attention for a book, and I need background noise and lights to free up my higher brain functions so they can rest a bit. When that happens, I turn to TV.
Jonathan, that’s where the internet is so dangerous. You can just trawl for interesting fats. I waste heaps of time on the science blogs.
And I have my favourite comfort TV shows/movie for those times you mentioned.