How I Read

Ever since I got serious about my writing, I have found myself reading differently. At first, I made a conscious effort to read like a writer, but now I can't help it. I just do.

I recently realized though that there are two main ways that I do this.

The first way is really purposeful "writer reading". This type of reading happens when I'm faced with a challenge and I don't know how to solve it.

My favorite example of this type of reading was when I was first starting to write rhyming poetry and all my poetry fell into an ABAB rhyming pattern. I knew my poetry needed more variety, but I didn't know how to do anything other than what I was doing.

So I scoured the pages of Cricket and Spider and Highlights for wonderful poems. Then I figured out how they varied their rhyme, and I imitated their rhyming patterns.

After a few of these, I must have internalized how to vary my rhyme. After that intense reading and purposeful writing, my rhyming poetry no longer felt so similar. Hurray!

But not all my reading like a writer is quite so focused. A lot of times I'm just reading. Often something that has seemingly nothing to do with the kind of writing I tend to do.

For example, right now I'm immersed in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society". It is pretty far from the wacky picture books and sweet easy readers I tend to write. But I still read it like a writer.

As I read, I can't help thinking that I want to write a book in letters someday. That I love a book that plants clues so slowly in the beginning that I have to really work to figure out what's happening. I wonder how much I could challenge my much younger readers like this before they would give up reading in frustration. (After all, I went through several false starts before I could get past page 5.)

Maybe these ideas are just that, ideas. Maybe they'll never become part of my writing. But maybe they will.

After all, for years, I read all sorts of poetry-- rhyming and non-rhyming. I loved how subtle some of it felt and wished I could write that way. But I didn't know how. Then one day, I started a poetry collection that had a very different feel. I'll never know exactly where my new voice came from, but I was very excited to find it in me. Somehow, it must have come from all that wonderful "purposeless" reading.

So, I read like a writer no matter how I read. Please share, how do you read like a writer?