Man, I sit here in bed tonight, still fully clothed having just read for about…two hours?…and I am flippin dippin doo dappin exhausted.
I golfed today with Nikolai, you know, just to keep my white-dude quotas at acceptable levels. Didn’t play particularly well, didn’t play particularly poorly. I shot a 104…but, man, my putting was ON POINT today. And my drives weren’t that far off. It was all the iron work in the middle that fucked me. Used to be the best part of my game. “Nope. Not any more,” says life.
I finished my 10th book of the year tonight. That’s…legitimately, 7 books more than I read all last year, I think. Very, very proud of that, yo. I want to read 50 books this year, which means some cramming is gonna happen up in this piece, fo sho. But, man…if I want to be a writer, I have to READ. And, man, that’s okay with me. I used to loooooove to read. I read all the time when I was a kid. I devoured books as quickly as I could get my hands on them.
It started with the Hardy Boys. Then it was Star Trek novels. Then it was Lord of the Rings and Dune and other classics. And then school came around and I had to read so much for school…and that really killed reading for me. I couldn’t keep up. And when I finally graduated from college, I was burnt out. Reading for fun had been sucked out of me.
I haven’t really thought about that before, or put it in those words, but that’s really the truth. I stopped reading for fun right around the time I graduated from High School. I just couldn’t keep up.
In any event, I love being back in it now 🙂 It’s research, definitely, through and through…but it’s also fun. So it’s a mix of both, now, isn’t it? Half my brain is sitting engaged int the plot or story like a normal reader, and the other half is noting things that are working or not working.
I’m struck tonight, from my reading, how important “voice” really is to winning over a reader. I did not particularly like the last book I read, by which I mean it made some very basic mistakes that rendered it rather dull and unpolished overall…but it did have “voice.” And that pulled me through the other missteps. I did a fair amount of skimming this one as I read, something I’ve never really done before to be honest, but there were still passages here and there that made me stop and take notice, and there were still certain relationships between characters that I found were working for me at the end of the novel.
So, yeah…writers, if you work on ONE thing (beyond falling completely head over heels in love with your characters, that’s the real number one)…okay, so let’s say ONE thing for your writing, nuts and bolts style…make it your voice. Make sure that YOU are in your words. If you read what you wrote and it doesn’t SOUND like you, rewrite it so that it does. All the rest of the technical stuff is secondary, I think, to voice, to personality. If I feel like you are talking to me, if I can hear that personal point of view come through your prose…I might just forgive your other mistakes and mishaps.
Sleepy time. Pups need to be pee’d and poo’d, and then it’s sleepy times.
The A’s lost. I think it’s going to be another long season of baseball.