From The Literary Hub:
As a child, books were your refuge. The entirety of book-world was your tribe. The March family taught you morals; Anne of Green Gables, especially if you were like me, an unruly kid with reddish braids, gave you hope. Maybe Brian Robeson in Hatchet made you believe you could survive anything. The Lord of the Flies let you know that you wouldn’t.
As you grew older, you discovered new books and new ways to learn from them, but that profound connection you feel with them never left you.
What, though, if the joy did?
For life-long bookworms, as many novelists are, becoming a published author is a dream come true. Or perhaps more accurately, a long-awaited arrival. You enter the heart of the tribe.
. . . .
But what if becoming a published novelist was to rob the pleasure that inspired it? What if it was to hamper the act or, worse still, joy of reading?
My second novel, Shining Sea, came out in paperback last month. In the year between the hardcover release and the paperback, I was involved in promoting the novel, wrote a number of short and long-form nonfiction articles and op-eds, wrote some politically oriented speeches, and began researching and making notes for a new novel.
I also read like a coyote loose among sheep. I devoured new releases, explored and fell in love with a whole new (for me) genre, and consumed huge chunks out of my to-be-read pile. I re-read every book I own by Willa Cather, which is pretty much every book by Willa Cather. I consumed any book of fiction or creative nonfiction related to Uganda that I could get my hands on. I strode into bookstores and strolled back out with books recommended by the bookseller. I always am startled when, at the end of the year, I tally my book-buying costs. This year I may need to down a glass of wine first.
In October, after a final loop through California, all of my scheduled book touring for Shining Sea will be done. As much as I enjoy visiting bookstores and meeting readers, I look forward to settling down to the nitty-gritty of my new novel, closing my office door to the world, and turning the notes and random pages and research I’ve amassed over the past year into a carefully crafted whole.
Does this mean my greedy fiction-reading streak will have to end?
. . . .
Kelly Simmons, author of One More Day and the forthcoming Fourth of July, says, “[W]hen I’m writing I can’t tolerate what others might call a guilty pleasure. I’m worried it might seep in!”
I also shy away from reading other people’s fiction when I’m in the thick of writing a new novel. I have to read daily, especially before I go to sleep at night. The idea of not doing so is impossible; I might as well go on a fast—something you would never catch me doing. But while I’m developing the voice of a book, I don’t want to hear someone else’s fiction cadences.
. . . .
The irony! Doing the job I love, although intimately connected to the pastime I love, clearly also interferes with it.
Some novelists do read other people’s fiction while they write. “I always read, even when I am in the thick of my own work,” Marcy Dermansky, author most recently of The Red Car says, “because I need to be reading. It would be too bleak not to be reading; it takes a long time to write a novel.”
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
I can’t stop reading. I have confined it to bedtime and when I’m on the stair machine. This holds well until I’m in the last 50 pages or so of whatever book I’m reading. Then I start yearning.
I take ‘readcations’ where I don’t write for two weeks and read as many books in as many genres as I can before getting back to work.
Oh good, I’m not alone.
For me it’s two things. Time is one. I have a limited time budget in my day. If I’m going to get writing and editing done, something has to go. Two, it’s not so much bleed through of others’ work (although there is that), it’s that when I start reading, it’s hard to stop. A paragraph, a page, a chapter, a book, NEXT BOOK! And calling a halt to that halfway through a chapter in order to go write is HAAAAARD. Better avoid the issue to start with.
Ditto. All those writing hours are replacing the reading hours. So then it’s read before bed, and next thing you know it is three in the morning and I’m half way through the book. Or, sometimes, I pick the book up and fall asleep with it in my hand before I even read a word.
Though unlike others above, I don’t think I have a problem with it seeping into my own writing.
I tend toward nonfic when I’m writing one of my romances. Between books is one of my happy places — not that writing isn’t, but totally different in flavor.
I noticed when I started writing seriously, I almost stopped reading other’s fiction. It’s like I’d been devouring other’s stuff for 50 years and now it was time for mine.
The brain only has room for one fictional universe that’s not lodged in there. It has to be mine. Fortunately, Dune’s and On the Beach’s and Jane Eyre’s are already in there.
So I tend to re-read things I know very well – their cadences are already stuck in my head, and I’ve processed them.
And it’s rather nice to revisit old friends. 🙂
I’m the same–when I’m writing, I can only read books I’ve read before. They’re comfortable, like old friends, and I struggle to read anything new, no matter how good.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. The only things I can read while writing are 1) nonfiction, 2) in a genre so far away from what I’m doing its not going to leak (like Tomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks while writing a fantasy set in a mythical China).
My biggest problem is reading books that inspire me to write on my own work. Because of this, I sometimes have to choose my reading materials with care as anything too “close” to my own work will make me set the book I’m reading aside to focus on my own writing when I’d rather be reading beacuse that story isn’t moving.