Muse Week Day Five: Finding a Thousand Muses
Added 2024-10-05 13:02:41 +0000 UTCMy favourite uncle started writing at the tender age of 75. Before I’d read his work, I expected to see what I usually see in these scenarios: Excruciating writing laden in typos but, incredibly, he took to writing like Reds to cupcakes.
Asshole.
It happens, but it’s rare. Writing is one of the most popular life goals I’ve ever encountered. Everyone has a book in them. That’s what they say, but few really know how to write it. Just because you can set words to paper, doesn’t mean you can set the right words to paper, so what did my favourite uncle have that few others do?
That’s easy. He was an avid reader.
It. Is. Not. Possible. To. Learn. To. Write. Without. Reading.
Only when you fall in love with your craft will you create magic with it.
The less you read, the slower you’ll grow. I can introduce you to a writer’s toolkit big enough to fill the Googleplex, but you’ll never REALLY understand those tools unless you see them in action. You can workshop your work all decade and still miss the point. You can do every writing course on the web and still be a terrible writer because if you’re not reading, you’ll never really grasp the point of anything you learn.
This week is muse week, and you might have noticed you need more than one route to inspiration. You actually need thousands. You need Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes and Lewis Carroll. You need Iain Banks and Rita Dove and Walt Whitman. You need to be immersed in books every damned day because writing is a kind of disease you can only catch by seeing it done exceptionally well.
Today’s exercise is to read the genre you want to write. If you’re not sure which writers to read in your niche, ask me. I will help.
