Essay
Reading as a Writer
Words are bittersweet
When he was young, my husband learned to play the drums. Although he didn’t become a drummer, the lessons and experience gave him a lasting appreciation of music, of musicians, and of performance. I had no musical training as a child and so I have very little musical discernment.
I am a special needs teacher. My teaching eyes do not close outside the classroom. I find myself silently diagnosing people I meet: he has speech and language issues; she’s on the spectrum; hmm, think he’s got a bit of developmental coordination disorder…
It’s hard, maybe impossible to turn off discernment, knowledge, understanding.
When I was a teenager I did not write beyond the requirements of school. But I read heaps.
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties with words.
Virginia Woolf
Now that I am a writer, books, especially novels and poems, but even opinion pieces in the newspaper, are different to me.
