A Writer is a Reader First

It is my firm belief that all great writers start out as great readers. I have had a love affair with the written word for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories from when I was very young, six maybe, of pulling a stack of books from my parents' bookshelf, curling up in my father's chocolate brown recliner and reading.

I think I first realized how much I loved reading in middle school, when I spent the entire summer before seventh grade staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading the entire Anne of Green Gables series. I literally (no pun intended) lost myself in those books. I was Anne, on Prince Edward Island at the turn of the century. I fell in love with Gilbert right along with her. That was really the first time I realized the power of the written word. How it could transport you to another time, another place, give you an all access pass into someone else's thoughts and feelings.

I didn't realize I was a writer, however, until my sophomore year in college. On a whim, I signed up for a fiction workshop. I felt like I needed something light in an otherwise heavy schedule (I was preparing to major in psychology and had a courseload full of classes like statistics and social psychology). As we started the course, reading through Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and writing short stories to share with the class, I began to see all the books I'd read differently.

I'd always had this idea that stories came out all at once, that a writer sat down at their desk and typed out a novel from start to finish. I had no idea how much thought and effort it took to write a single page or paragraph or sentence. I didn't realize that you could sit down to write one story, and end up writing something completely different.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The more I learned about writing, the more I learned to read like a writer. To appreciate the beauty of a well paced plot, enjoy a particularly well-rounded character, admire a setting described so well you could feel the bitter cold or sunshine on your face. In short, I began to learn to recognize good writing when I read it. Thinking back over all the novels I'd read through my life, I realized that the ones that really stayed with me, the ones I'd read over and over, were also the ones that were written well.

So what happened next? Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll tell you about my first (awful) attempt at actually writing fiction...