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Want to Be a Great Writer? Don’t Brag About Being a Non Reader
Being a book lover is about supporting a community.
I’m trying not to be 2017 Felicia where I keep saying violence isn’t the answer until it is indeed the only and absolute answer. The old Felicia (not to be confused with the current aging one) would kick over chairs and pen lengthy hit pieces on how your writing advice makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Back then I was smug, insolent, and only knew how to funnel my anger through type. But I’m older now, seasoned, and I have the kind of calm that conjures images of Mrs. Roper fanning about in psychedelic muumuus. Lounging in hammocks, stoned on quaaludes.
But a whisper of my 1.0 self emerged after I read an essay from a writer who bragged about their disdain for books of all kinds. This wasn’t a takedown of high-brow literature or experimental fiction, no, no, habibi, this was someone who refused to read anything. Down to fast-paced thrillers and frothy beach reads. No high, no low, this person admitted to be an avid reader of…their own work.
Bless your heart.
Books saved me. When I was small, my mother’s voice was the loudest sound. At seven, I likened her to thunder. My lips were sewn shut, voice swallowed, and my only reprieve from the hothouse home in which we lived was books. Back then I’d read stories about a pair of Sweet Valley twins driving a Fiat or sorority girls sporting pearls and cashmere sweaters. I was whisked to faraway lands like California and Ohio — states I learned about but never thought I’d ever visit.
Teachers marveled over my high math scores — best in her class!!! Perhaps because my stories about little girls hanging from trees frightened them. Their kicking feet, their face the color of a day-old bruise, lips plumped and puckered from the inevitable ballooning. Guidance counselors wondered aloud if something was wrong at home — of course, there was something wrong at home, there was always something wrong at home. Instead of probing, they’d give me awards for excellence in math and Spanish. Hiding my short stories at the bottom of the pile.
In junior high school, I switched up books about cheerleaders in sweaters for scotch-drinking husbands and the catatonic wives who slept…
