Recharge

One thing that I noticed about my enforced hiatus was how very much I read. While I was writing full time, I continued to buy books at about the same rate that I had before, but I hadn't really been reading them consistently. Or at all. As a matter of fact, I had an entire stack of books, many by some of my favorite authors, that were pretty much untouched.

About a week after Thanksgiving, I picked one up, and by Christmas break was through the stack and looking for more. On my recent trip to Dubai, I brought two along, and finished both before I got home. (I would have bought another book in the Amsterdam airport, but I don't know Dutch.)

Why the change? I've always been a quick and avid reader, but this rate of consumption was high even for me. And I think it's because I needed to recharge.

I've never been a director, but I have to wonder--does a director go see other movies while he's filming his own? I would very much doubt it. Part of it is because he simply doesn't have time, and part because he doesn't want to compromise his own movie with the way another director would do the same thing. Those are both valid, and they both apply to me as well. But I also noticed one other thing about reading in the midst of writing.

When I'm composing fiction, I'm not just thinking like a reader. I'm thinking like a writer. Imagine the face of a clock. It's simple: just twelve marks and two hands, at its simplest. Someone who is trying to tell time doesn't need to know how the clock works to get what they need out of the clock.

But the person who made the clock, or who is fixing the clock, needs to open it up. Then you can see inside at all the complex gadgets and gizmos that make the clock work. Because even the simplest device can have complex underpinnings.

So when I'm in a writing mode, I can't help but think about the clockwork behind a story. In writing about Bryony, I'm not engaged in the same way that a reader is (hopefully) engaged. I know which of her friends will survive and which won't, and I know the big revelations about her past that are coming down the line. My attention is engaged by how I'm going to tell that story, by dribbling out bits and pieces of information while keeping my character arcs going and doing the whole juggling act of writing.

To use another metaphor, I'm cooking, not eating. Cooking can be fun and rewarding, but it uses different sensabilities and different skills than eating and appreciating the food.

I say all of that to say this: if I try to read a novel while I'm in writing mode, I'm going to be so concerned about how and why the writer did what he did, that I will stop paying attention to the story. That's doing a disservice to the story. That doesn't mean that I can see some of the seams where exposition has been added, or predict what is going to happen in the story based on a bit of foreshadowing that was layered in, but I can fool myself into ignoring them so I can just appreciate the story.

Reading during this hiatus has shown me the two different mindsets I need to be able to have. I think it's a good thing that I took some time off from writing, recharged my fiction batteries, and enjoyed some excellent fiction. Right now, I'm in transition between mindsets, and I'll be interested to see how that affects both my reading and my writing.