The entry title is another googlism (see link from previous entry). I’ve got my book back, so about reading. The book, Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers, has appeared here before, linked (use search function to your right for ease, if you like; please do not email me about tags and categories and the like! Someday.) What I wish is that I could read like this:
Because reading creates a slight trance state, it even has the potential to be addictive. Time goes by and little else seems to get accomplished. Even the desire for accomplishment is numbed. Living vicariously through the thoughts and feelings of book characters, it is easy to forget one intended to be a writer in the first place!
I remember reading like that. Certainly, the MFA program changes reading. I would like to have this trance state back, now and again, at will.
Sher describes the ideal of how a writer reads, which I would say is nearer to what happens with me. But note the word “nearer.” I like her ideal, however.
A writer sifts his reading through his emotional, psychological, spiritual and aesthetic experience, transmuting it into language that is his own. This in itself is stabilizing. Instead of floating around on effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts, he gradually becomes rooted in his own approach, his own vision and imagination. Even if he just writes a paragraph, he will “have” something from which he can build. Money isn’t the only commodity subject tot he “power of compounding.”
But see, I would still like occasional floating around on effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts. (Which is not like a stare.)