Writers and certainly good writers are dependent on literature and need to read as much as they need to write. Many musicians experience depression when they don't play at least once a day and many writers experience the same down feeling when they don't peck at their computers or pick up a pen; however they also have the need to pick up a book that they did not write themselves.
Orhan Pamuk in his essay, "The Implied Author" ) in the book "Other Colors"(Please see Bibliography)states: "Let me explain what I feel on a day when I've not written well, am unable to lose myself in a book. First, the world changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable."
I know when I worked a 40 hour plus job, five days a week job and I had to go to a conference and attend meetings in the evening I felt an overwhelming desire to escape the combination of meeting and party that few people understood. I would wait until people got used to seeing me and after I signed in and I would escape to my room in the hotel where the meetings were being held so I can have some quiet time for myself to do some writing and to read. Often I remember a story that was written while looking out overlooking a valley towards the mountains just on the edge of Los Angeles or one story over looking a runway outside of the San Francisco Airport. I had a tray that had coffee and some half and half and I was sitting in a chair writing a story and feeling relieved to be away from the beer and the loud music that was in the rooms I just left. I never felt happier.
Fred White in his book, "The Daily Writer", (see Bibliography) said: "Successful writers are omnivores--gluttons--when it comes to reading because they are continually fascinated by yet another way of telling a story, of new ways of using language to evoke sensory impressions, to transport us to other times and places." White means that writers read outside your own experiences and read outside the kind of writing that you normally do. Writers often read to continuously re-discover why they write in the first place.
There has been times I have been reading a book where the author's words transported me out of myself and into a new understanding of some concept or some aspect of life itself. I remember my skin prickling and the hair on the back of my neck standing up. It was then I knew I would never be the same again. There were other times I felt a deep sense of sadness and sorrow for something that happened either recently or hundreds of years ago.
Pamuk in the same essay states that he prefers writers who are deceased. I have no such preference. It was with great sadness that I learned that Stieg Larsson who wrote "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" had passed away. At 50 years of age, I expected to enjoy years of his books. The death of Sherlock Holmes' writer Author Conon Doyle has not slowed down the adventures of his fictional character at all.
Sven Birkerts in his book, "Reading Life: Books for the Ages", (please see Bibliography) "Reading is open, in the world, in life, because reading is the most complex and volatile way we've found to merge the experienced and the imagined. Turning the pages of a challenging novel we spark up not just our intellect, but also our emotional and our dreaming selves."
Sometimes, I think the goal of reading and writing is to reach beyond ourselves as human beings and into the realm of creativeity and even into the worlds beyond and into our inner selves.
