My Dear friends:
You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so...
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that...
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in …
-- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
To write effectively, one needs to do: read and write, two essential things like yin and yang, two parts of a greater whole. While basic writing skills can be taught (see "Rhetorical Devices," introduced in To the Lighthouse posts), it's almost important to teach the art of fine writing, but it can be learned through reading, especially reading masterworks.
Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
-- William Faulkner, Lion in the Garden: Interviews With William Faulkner, 1926-1962
I would like to invite you to write haiku and/or tanka about reflections on the books you've read.
For example, The Great Gatsby, which turned a hundred last week, is "a novel about excess: about the glitzy, rowdy parties of the Jazz Age and the beautiful people that attended them; about vanity and class; and about the insatiable American desire for more" ...( The New Yorker, April 9: "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life in Drinks")
The Great Gatsby
turning 100 sparks joy
and sadness ...
my bookworm friend laments,
this desire for more, more, more
And the following tanka could be read as an example of this insatiable American desire for more articulated in The Great Gatsby:
alone
by the penthouse window
my friend repeats
this is America
why settle for pretty good?
Look forward to reading your work (see submission guidelines here)
Chen-ou
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