HOW WRITING HAS IMPACTED MY READING

By Sharon Ewing

I’ve always been an avid reader beginning with picture books, illustrated classics, fairy tales, and even textbooks. As a youth I read compulsively, even the cereal boxes we sat on the breakfast table before school.  I wasn’t exactly a discriminating reader. My sister looked at me as though I’d lost my mind when I told her, as we walked to school, how excited I was to get my new textbooks. I just loved words. I loved learning about anything new.  In my teen years, dad and I would walk to the library and lug home an armload of books. I never thought about how a story was put together, or much about the person behind the words.

I’ve always liked books with tons of detail and words I’d never encountered. I’ve poured over Hawthorne, Cooper, Michener, Tolstoy and reveled in their marathon-like sentences, using punctuation I knew I could never hope to imitate.  I sat many summers with my head in books required for the next year.  I could choose a few.  I read them all.

 I continue to be a lover of detail and vocabulary, but now have a deeper understanding of the beauty of simple concise sentences as well. I understand better the need for sentence variety. Through new reading choices, I’ve developed an appreciation for different styles.

Now I’m not so much a compulsive reader. I’m much more likely to discard a book when the plot lags, the characters need a transfusion or the dialogue becomes redundant.  Before my transition from reader to writer, I often felt guilty when I didn’t finish a book.  If someone had asked me why I didn’t like the book, I would have likely have said that it had become boring; I’d lost interest.  Now when I discard a book or a story, I can usually detail the reason. 

I still carve time out of my day to read and enjoy many different genres, but I observe my story more, as I read. I have found authors who can satisfy my love of place through poetic description but also move the story and the reader more through action scenes and dialogue. I’ve studied their economy of words, and my writing has changed because of these stories.

I believe we all go through an evolution of reading styles and genres from cradle to grave.  But I don’t think I’d ever have become as engrossed in analyzing the elements of a great story along the way if I hadn’t chosen to try my hand at constructing my own stories.  We can never know, as we chose a path to explore, what lies ahead.  My adventure has just begun.