The Power of Reading

 

It always pains me to meet someone who wants to make and tell stories and tells me they don’t read. It’s even worse when they follow that up with, “Oh, I don’t really watch TV or movies or play games or anything either.”

 

It especially gets to me because I can remember a time when I, too, was one of those people. I wanted to tell stories. But I worried that if I read other people’s books, watched too many movies or TV shows, or – in essence – exposed myself to too much content, my own work would be tainted by it. But something I have learned over the years that has helped me immensely in my efforts to improve is this:

 

“Tainted” is the wrong word here.

 

We as human beings have a penchant for sharing stories. It is one of the things that really sets us apart as a species, this tradition of fabricating alternate realities, or revisiting our past in riveting detail. We have an amazing capacity to create something from almost nothing. But something we have to acknowledge and even embrace about ourselves is that we can’t create something out of absolutely nothing.

 

Having taken as many creative writing classes as I have, I have been told more times than I can count to “write what I know.” At first, I used to think, “well if I only write what I know, it’s always going to be boring, because I just don’t know that much.” What I failed to understand for a long time was that writing what you know is merely the beginning. If you start out by telling a story about, say, World War II for instance, but you know nothing about World War II, you’re not going to look like you know what you’re talking about because – guess what? You don’t. If you want to tell a good story, one that feels authentic and can be taken seriously, you start with what you know. Still want to write that World War II story? Fine. If you don’t know anything about World War II, now is the time to change that. Learn everything you can about it. Become an expert in it. Then, you’ll be able to say you’re writing what you know. Then, you’ll own it.

 

The basic definition of creativity is to see two seemingly unrelated things, and to see a way that they connect in a new or exciting way. Consequentially, the art of storytelling follows this same definition, since storytelling is inherently a creative process. As an aspiring author, I couldn’t go forever without facing the reality that nothing I do will be one hundred percent original. I’m going to tell it to you straight: your story has been done before. But don’t get discouraged. Just because you are not the first or the last play in a particular sandbox, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still play in it. It may be the same sandbox, but you can make your own sculpture, play your own games with that same sand.

 

Once you accept that your stories will always draw from other materials, the world, interestingly enough, has a habit of opening up to you. As you expand and increase your knowledge of what’s around you…what’s been done before, you find yourself with more disparate points to play with and make connections between. In short, the more content that goes in, the more you can put out. Because if you know more about the world around you, then “writing what you know” suddenly isn’t so confining, is it?