Reading and Writing

I don't remember the first book I ever read as a child, it was likely a simple book intended to introduce children to written words.  I do recall a particular love of the Mr Men books by Roger Hargreaves of which I had the little library collection.  The earliest work of fiction I can remember reading and falling in love with however was Roald Dahl's 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory' which we were probably required to read in school although I distinctly remember a hardback copy of the book that I owned which in researching this post I have discovered is now worth over £6,000 [$8,000~] which I no longer own unfortunately.  It is amazing how some of the things we own in our youth can end up being worth so much money today, when I think of all the consoles I owned over the years there are more than a few I wish I had held onto.

Reading was something I had a love and hate relationship with as a child.  I have Nystagmus which I have discussed in previous posts but for the sake of brevity it is a condition that causes my eyes to constantly move which manifests itself mainly as a visual impairment that makes me short sighted and makes me blind to things that move beyond a certain speed.  Reading was something I loved the idea of but found difficult because most books when I was growing up where not accessible and my eyesight was a lot worse, it improved as I grew older until my late teens when it slowly started to decline again.  I love the fact that services like Audible exist today and wish I had access to them as a child.  The closest thing I got to this was an audiobook service called Calibre which was a charity that provided audio books to people with visual impairments - these came on cassette tapes at the time, would be ordered through the post and take a while to arrive, if stock of the book was all out on loan then it could be a while before you would get it.  The instant access provided by Audible and services like it is something that I find to be an example of technology improving the lives of people who otherwise are excluded from experiences that others take for granted.

As reading became more accessible to me with age my interest grew and so did the topics that interested me, of which there's still no rhyme or reason but it's still fun to explore.  The most recent book I read was 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde, a book I was aware of and understood the concept of but had never actually read - you can probably guess this was related to the post I wrote about frames of reference, reading this and quite a few other classic works of fiction was an objective I set myself in 2019 but never managed to complete, in hindsight I set the bar too high for how many works I would actually read - the goal was 100 in 2019 of which I managed just 17 which was just over 1 per month on average.  2020 on the other hand my goal is much more moderate at just 12 books which I think I will surpass by the end of the year, I'll revisit this in a future post with an update on progress - this post is actually being written in January for context which gives you an idea how much of a buffer exists to the content scheduled for posting on this blog.

[Edit: If you were wondering I didn't read a lot during quarantine, I spent most of my time learning Spanish with Duolingo, or playing Stardew Valley to distract myself]

One thing I would like to try and do more of this year however is to read more books in other languages.  The only book I managed to read last year that wasn't in English was the Spanish language translation of 'The Da Vinci Code' which I have returned to many times because I like the English version just as much - something I also do with Harry Potter from time to time.  I want to read books this year that I have not read before though, I want new experiences and new content to consume.

I write and publish fiction under a pen name through Amazon, through the course of this endeavour I have also read works created by people who have also ventured into that realm.  Some of those authors are very talented, I follow a few of them on twitter because I am interested in their works.  Some authors however it is apparent they have not read much themselves before they ventured into writing.  One piece of advice I picked up quite early before I started publishing my content for public access was that if you want to be a better writer you should read, the more you read the better you will become as a writer, not necessarily because you will be influenced by the content itself although that does happen, but because you learn quite quickly what works and what doesn't work.  This is one reason why when I write works of fiction I leave gaps between drafts that are weeks, sometimes months before I come back to the content to review and expand it - if I can't pick it up and follow the story myself then there's no hope that a reader could either.  The mistakes we make when we write are things we become complacent with and ignorant to when we continually revisit the same piece.  You need to take a break and return to it later with a new eye for detail to be able to spot some of the mistakes that were right in front of you.

I should point out here that the amount of effort I put into writing for this blog versus writing fiction is not comparable.  A piece of fiction I will spend months working on and revising.  Those works are proofread many times before they are published and often reviewed by friends before they actually go live.  These posts are a lot less intensive and do occasionally contain mistakes so they aren't a fair representation of what to expect if you were to read my published works - the subject matter too also diverges quite markedly.

Reading and Writing go hand in hand in more ways than one.  If you want to be a better writer then read more, that piece of advice has served me well this far so I will leave you with that for emphasis.