read, read, read

“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”  William Faulkner

I read a lot. Over the years, I have read a lot of diverse things. I thought it interesting when I found out that I was more widely read than many of the literature teachers I met. Although he was more widely read in his specialty area, I was more widely read than my college lit teacher who had his PhD in literature.

I just like to read. Of course, here lately, I have read more fiction than otherwise and for some reason, William Johnstone and Louis L’Amour books hold a special appeal. Maybe their simplicity, their black and white way of looking at things. Maybe, just maybe, they are like women’s romances. No, of course not. They are manly books. When the boy gets the girl, he usually gets shot too. So he has to go up into the mountains where the air is thinner and eat a lot of bacon and drink a lot of coffee to get well. That’s a real man’s book.

Anyway, reading has been a problem with me in my life. I had trouble in my first denomination, the Church of Christ, because of my reading. It was not a denomination that prized wide thinking. It had a certain viewpoint and all others were contrary and detrimental to the minister.

I knew a guy who went through his PhD in philosophy and never changed his viewpoint that was a minister of this denomination. That takes some work to read all that stuff and not be changed.

I read philosophy, and I read a lot of the eastern stuff. I read a lot of the Great Books of the Western World (a set of books I bought back in the early 70’s to make the guy leave but that I found out I liked). I just read. I also read a lot of fiction, both contemporary and older.

I remember the day I got caught up in the book Babbit, but Sinclair Lewis. We had to read it for English class, I guess tenth grade maybe, but it, as books do, caught me. we were doing something else in class, and I was reading it secretly under the desk, like a guy would do a Playboy or something.

My teacher saw me reading secretly and came up and said, Well, Mr Cliver, what are you reading. She reached in and pulled out – Babbit. She didn’t know what to do. It is rare that a teacher finds one of her student reading “good literature” on his own time. She stood there for a moment, then gave it back to me with a perplexed look on her face and said Read it later, please.

I suppose the reading made me want, sooner or later, to write. I want to write something that someone will have trouble putting down. And while I enjoy writing for this blog, I would like to write something that was for a wider audience.

I have to admit, I know when I write something that is good. And I know when I write gibberish. Occasionally I will write something that I know has merit and I usually put those in a different file.

But a writer has to be also a reader. How in the world can you do something if you do not know what it looks like when you get finished?