Read before you write

I have said on more than one occasion that more people write poetry than read poetry. That may be an overstatement, but not by much.

How many people have tried their hand at writing a poem or two? Most literate people have probably done so, at least in their youth. I wrote a few poems myself when I was in college. Fortunately for both me and the world, I chose journalism, not poetry.

Gabriel Zaid

Gabriel Zaid goes even further in So Many Books. He opines that many people write books, or at least think about writing a book or talk about writing a book, without actually reading a book, or without reading very many books. With the ease of self-publishing today, virtually anyone can publish a book. I could very easily assemble my blog posts into a book. I can't imagine anyone actually paying money to buy such a book, however, so I don't go to the trouble. But many other people do something similar. It's so easy. You can write that novel you've been thinking about for years or assemble letters or your sermons or your memoirs or all those poems you wrote in your youth and very quickly have a book with your name on it. How cool would that be?

Zaid puts the thinking of many people into words: "Don't ask me to pay attention to you; pay attention to me. I don't have the time or the money or the desire to read what you've written; I want your time, your money, your desire. Never mind your concerns; what about mine?"

Those words convict me, too. I write a blog, but I rarely read other people's blogs. The same may be true of people who have podcasts or who have accounts on YouTube, or TikTok  or whatever. It is even true in conversations. We want to be heard. Never mind about other people might have to say. Instead of listening, we think about what we will say when it is our turn.

Poet Judson Jerome suggested that writers of little-read books, like poetry, should place a five-dollar bill in each new copy. That way readers would be encouraged ... and rewarded. It's a bad idea — writers of little-read books usually don't have spare cash and it would be too easy to snatch the money without reading the book — but it at least addresses the problem.

Zaid has another idea. He suggests a National Regulatory Board of Supply and Demand that would require that you read so many poems before you could publish one poem or so many books before you could publish your own book. Again, it's a bad idea. Do we really want government telling us when we can write something or monitoring what we read? Those barely literate celebrities who hire ghost writers to tell their story would really be stymied.

Yet it is something we should be thinking about. If we want other people to read what we're writing — or hear what we're saying — perhaps we should be more willing to do the same for them.

Reading to live

Gustave Flaubert

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert

So what do you suppose that means?

Amusement and instruction are, in fact, the most common reasons for reading. When we read mysteries or thrillers or romances, we probably want to be entertained. If we read history books or self-help books or cookbooks, we probably want to learn something.

But what books does one read "in order to live"? I think all of the above, and more.

Living is about experiences. It's about meeting people, exchanging ideas, learning more about yourself, feeling real emotions, thinking, accumulating memories, developing relationships, loving, forming opinions, becoming a better person and so on.

I don't think reading should be a substitute for living. A person who does nothing but read probably does not have much of a life. Sometimes you must put your book down and go out and actually do something, preferably with someone else. But when we do read, and this may be what Flaubert was getting at, we should read to enhance those real-life experiences, not replace them.

Alleluia to the world

A certain lucent correspondence has served me, all my life, in the ongoing search for my deepest thoughts and feelings. It is the relationship of my own mind to landscape, to the physical world —especially to that part of it with which, over the years, I have (and not casually) become intimate.

Mary Oliver, Little Alleluias

The poet Mary Oliver died in 2019. Little Alleluias (2025) is a posthumous collection of her writings, both poems and essays. In one of these essays she calls her poems "little alleluias," her "way of offering praise to the world."

She writes in a poem called "The Return": From my mouth to God's ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song.

Even her essays often read like poems. Consider this line from an essay called "Flow." "This enormity, this cauldron of having green and blues, is the great palace of the earth." Doesn't that sound like a little alleluia?

Yet she is at her best in her poetry. True, she sometimes stretches for meaning, yet she shines when she lets the meaning come to her. As she writes,

The poem is not the world.

It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

Sometimes she gets personal, as when she recalls her school days:

I went out of the school fast

and through the gardens and to the woods,

and spent all summer forgetting what I'd been taught –

Mostly she writes about the natural world that she explored each day of her life since she was a school girl ... and sings her little alleluias.

A blow against the devil

The obsolete book, printed on paper, is both immortal and perishable at the same time.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

Stephen Starring Grant

Stephen Starring Grant spent a year of his life as a rural mail carrier in Virginia and devotes one chapter of his memoir to books. The post office has always treated books as special — there is a lower rate for books — and as a mailman, Grant says he also gave them special care.

He writes that the Jesuits believe "every word you write is a blow that strikes the devil." Then he adds, "Every book I delivered did the same."

He notes that books left in the rain or chewed on by dogs can easily be ruined, and these are things that can happen to book packages left carelessly by mail carriers. All packages, but especially those containing books, needed to be treated with care, he says.

Grant goes into post office history, telling the reasons why books have always been given priority treatment. "With the help of the U.S. Post Office," he writes, "the homestead was no longer some isolated island of humanity. Instead, by a coal oil lamp and later electricity, it became a node in a network, connected to a larger universe of ideas."

The post office has changed through the years, yet books still get special treatment. Grant, for one, doesn't find anything wrong with that.

Frankly, my dear

Movie lines, whether by design or not, can become part of our language. Everybody repeats them and then reframes them to suit different situations. Brian Abrams collects these movie quotes in his book "You Talkin’ to Me?" (2023).

Some movies, such as The Godfather and Casablanca, are treasure troves of famous lines. In fact, there are so many in these movies that Abrams ignores some of them. Instead he gives us lines hardly anyone has ever repeated from movies hardly anyone has ever seen, such "Bye, Felisha" from Friday.

On the plus side, Abrams tells us how famous lines ended up in particular movies and/or how the scenes developed in which the lines were said. He tells us that the first character to say "May the force by with you" isn't even named in Star Wars. In Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable was supposed to say, "Frankly, my dear, it has become of no concern to me."

"Follow the money" from All the President's Men, is now said frequently in many contexts. As has "You had me at 'Hello'" from Jerry Maguire. 

The 1989 film Field of Dreams is remembered for the line, "If you build it, he will come." I paraphrased that line in an email just the other day, demonstrating how certain movie lines have life because they can be used in a variety of situations and bring a smile to anyone who remembers where the original line came from.

Abrams doesn't make this observation, but reading his book makes me wonder whether the age of great movie lines may be coming to end. The last line he quotes is "Wakanda forever" from Black Panther, which is not exactly memorable or repeatable in other contexts. This is from 2018, or five years before his book was published. People no longer go to movie theaters to watch the same few movies as we used to. We now watch movies on television, but there are so many of them that we don't necessarily watch the same ones. For movie lines to mean something, we all have to know where they came from. Nowadays that is rarely true.

Lost at the beginning

The plot of a typical novel has four parts. Jane Smiley calls them exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. These are usually easy to identify in any novel you are reading. You are first introduced to the key characters and the situation at the beginning of the story. Then things start to happen.  Then comes the resolution. Finally comes the summing up, the return to normalcy, or the "happily ever after" perhaps.

Lately, perhaps because growing older has made me impatient, I have been having trouble with the first part, the exposition. It seems that I start novel after novel and abandon it after 50 pages or less. Not only don't I know where the story is going, but I find that I don't even care. I don't like the characters. Their situation doesn't interest me. Or I simply don't understand what is going on. I don't read novels to be bored. I want to care early on about what's going to happen next.

Just the other day I abandoned Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. The book actually contains two novellas with the same characters. Not that I got very far into the first story. The monk is called Dex, but I jumped ship before the robot came along. Mostly I was turned off because Chambers gives Dex plural pronouns. He was always "they." I just didn't care what happened to Dex and "their" robot." I didn't like being confused. I turned to what I hoped will be a more interesting novel. It is.

And so it has gone too frequently. It is not that I necessarily want the action to start earlier. I loved When the Cranes Fly South despite the fact that there is hardly any action at all through the entire novel. But I liked the main character and wanted to know what would happen to him.

Some novelists begin their novels at the end, giving us a taste of the climax before going back to the beginning. Sometimes this works, but usually I prefer stories in chronological order. Save the climax for the climax. Even so, novelists need to do a better job of making their expositions interesting enough — or their characters interesting enough — to keep readers, including old and impatient readers like me, hanging around.

The mailman's life

If you think your letter carrier isn't keeping a list of who's naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.

Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman

The person who delivers our mail each day is one of those people most of us just take for granted. We just expect our mail to be placed in our box each day at about the same time. We give little thought to everything that goes into getting our mail to us.

And so reading Stephen Starring Grant's Mailman (2025) might be a good idea for all of us.

Laid off from his corporate job at the age of 50 in the middle of Covid, and with a family depending on him, Grant took a job delivering the mail in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. He delivered the mail for a year, and his experiences are eye-opening.

Grant underwent the post office training expected of all new hires, yet even after weeks on the job he felt incompetent and ready to quit. Sorting the mail correctly, dealing with all those packages (especially during the Christmas season), delivering the mail to the right place at the right time and, yes, dealing with all those dogs that seem to hate mail carriers was a daily struggle for him.

Yet he stuck with it and, he now believes, became a better man for it. He talks about the paper cuts, the other injuries common to mail carriers, the importance of rubber bands, the difficult deliveries to ridiculous places and everything else that becomes a part of a mail carrier's life.

He says at one point that his "greatest accomplishment was not quitting." And yet eventually he did quit when he got another, better-paying job in the corporate world. But at least he gave us this book about what the post office looks like from the inside.

Following the crowd

Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami said, "If everyone only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." I only half agree with that statement.

People can read the same books and think very different thoughts about those books. That is the basis for literary criticism. One critic thinks one thing about a book, while another critic thinks something entirely different about the same book. If this is true of Pride and Prejudice, it can also be true of the hottest book on the current best-seller list. Just because we read the same books it does not mean that we all think the same way. Book clubs wouldn't be much fun if that were true.

On the other hand, and this is where I agree with Murakami, only reading the same books everyone else in your circle is reading does display a lack of independent thinking. You may be reading for the wrong reasons. You may be more interested in belonging, in being part of the crowd, than in following your own interests and your own taste in literature.

While two people can think differently while reading the same book, their individuality is even more enhanced when they read different books. Reading the same book can bind together those in the same friend group, the same book club or the same literature class, but following our own individual literary tastes is what makes us truly unique. Because we are reading different books we are able to think different thoughts when reading the same books.

On the way out

Words come and go. New words enter the English language each year, while others are used less and less often until they finally fade from the language altogether.

Read Shakespeare or almost any literature from a century or more ago and you are likely to find head-scratching words. What does that word mean? Or when did it mean that and not this? Dictionaries describe certain words and certain meanings of words as archaic. These words were once important. Now they are ignored.

Anne Curzan

In her book Says Who?, linguist Anne Curzan predicts that whom is one of those words likely to disappear from the language. Already, in fact, its use is rare. When someone says something like, "Whom did you tell?" it raises eyebrows. It sounds snooty, even though it may be grammatically correct. Most of us would say, "Who did you ask?" and hardly anyone would look down on us.

Even Curzan herself admits that in informal writing and speaking, such as in email, she uses who even when sticklers for proper English usage would insist upon whom.

Even when who may be improper, at least according to our English teachers of old, it sounds proper to us. Whom, on the other hand, almost always sounds improper. Or it sounds too proper. It's not how real people talk or write.

For now, whom survives ... barely. In another 50 years or so, it may have become archaic.

Sci-fi women

When I started reading science fiction as a teenager in the late 1950s. it was a male-dominated field. Both writers and readers were predominately male. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Elison, H.L. Gold and Philip K. Dick ruled the roost. We teenage boys loved them. Girls had other things to read.

Sure, there were a few female writers in the game. Writers like Anne McCaffery  and Ursula K. Le Guin   were popular outliers. And then there was Alice Sheldon, who fooled readers and editors alike by writing under the name of James Tiptree Jr.

Martha Wells

Look at the science fiction shelves in any bookstore today, however, and you will find almost as many female authors as male. And perhaps even more. One finds veterans like Connie Willis, Martha Wells and Octavia E. Butler, as well as younger writers such as Becky Chambers, Sarah Brooks, Bethany Jacobs, Alexandra Gleeman, Emily Hamilton, Sierra Greer, Lindsay Ellis and Dani Francis. And then there are writers like Peng Shepherd, who write imaginative science fiction but don't call it that. 

If greater numbers of women are writing science fiction, it stands to reason that more of them are reading it, too. As a consequence, unless it is just my imagination, sci-fi books are gaining a more prominent display in bookstores than they once had.