The most vital advice I ever received about writing wasn’t directly about writing. It wasn’t about how to develop characters, prewrite, or structure a plot. Instead, it was advice about reading from my charismatic communications professor. One afternoon, with the signature flourish of his voice and sweeping hand gestures, he asked my class of 70 undergrads “Who here considers themselves readers? I mean, you read everything you can get your hands on. Reading to you is just as important as eating every day. It’s part of who you are.”
Only two students were bold enough to raise their hands. My 21-year-old self wasn’t one of them. “That’s what I figured,” he remarked. “There’s usually about two or three in any class. For rest of you, I tell you that readers have such an advantage over nonreaders, so I challenge you all to become readers. Read everything you can!”
Accepting his challenge on that day was the most valuable decision of my writing life. Stephen King says in On Writing that “Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” Over the past decade, so many writers have swept me away and illuminated how great writing works, and what makes it impactful and magical.
I began by rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, my childhood favorite. Aside from the captivating adventure, I recognized how this fantasy masterwork uses a reluctant protagonist to traverse the geographically and historically complex Middle Earth. As intricate as Tolkien’s world is, Bilbo’s tale makes it accessible to young readers. He introduces us to an alluring world without detracting from the mystery of it. So, we keep discovering with The Lord of the Rings.
Great writers create beautiful narratives out of the darkest of times. Reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr immersed me in a narrative from World War II. He contrasts that backdrop with a beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and hope that proves all the more enchanting from the darkness that surrounds it.
Reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was when the term metaphor transcended from a literary device into the way a writer infuses magic and power into her settings and characters. The Ramsey property becomes a metaphor for a war that shook the foundations of an entire generation. I read, spellbound, as “The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter…”
Then there is opportunity to preserve, for posterity’s sake, the idiosyncrasies of a particular era. The best writers capture the mindset, language, and attitude of an era. That’s why if an English professor asks on the first day of class what everyone’s favorite book is, there are always students that say The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. For me, I fell in love with Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere because she captures what it meant to live, as I did, as a child in pre-9/11 America.
And while my first love is fiction, reading nonfiction has bestowed invaluable lessons in form and craft. My professor’s words were to read everything you can get your hands on. I’ll refine that to say read every subject that is meaningful and fascinating; what can be learned about the craft from nonfiction writers is boundless.
Each essay or story I read by David Sedaris is a reminder that writing’s most important function is a search for a deeper understanding of one’s self, relationships, and environment. And if that search can bring you or others a smile or a laugh, the process will be all the more rewarding.
Nonfiction also reinforces that the most powerful writing takes the intimacy of personal narratives and threads them into a larger cultural tapestry. Just as Hemingway’s characters personalize the first World War, or Harper Lee’s Jim and Scout grow up in the South, the best nonfiction stories help paint a cultural and historical mural. Sam Quinones 2015 exposé Dreamland is a masterful work that gives readers a dynamic understanding of American’s opioid epidemic by fully developing snapshots of all the personal stories that shape it. On that same subject, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy follows the author’s own personal narrative of his family and rural community as it struggles with this crisis in its own unique ways. Both works are emblematic in how, regardless of how grand the subject matter, the best writing is intimate and personal.
Finally, I remember the winter afternoon, sitting in a corner of the Yorktown, Virginia library when I read that “Words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,” from Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. I set the book down, realizing that at last someone had purified into one sentence what I had been feeling my entire life. My hope is that all writers approach their craft with the same sentiment because for writers, words are reality.
While these weeks are difficult, they grant us the opportunity to deepen our most intimate and important relationships. I’m indulging in my love affair with the written word, discovering how much more it has to teach me.