Reading is not Writing

I have always wanted to write some book length nonfiction, and a few years ago I decided that the format for me was biography or memoir. The notion never went any further, until this Christmas I received a little more impetus in the form of the brilliant Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach and Kristen Keckler. They have disabused me of the notion that sitting in a comfortable chair reading someone else’s nonfiction book hardly constitutes me writing my own.

Perhaps there is a stage of preparing for the new book which involves soaking up information, especially if you’re writing about a topic or person about whom you know little. One thing I love about any form of writing is that it gives you an excuse to prod about in a new area of knowledge. It is the curiosity that lures me in, and the curiosity that often gets in my way of actually doing any writing.

As soon as you see some advice which says anything like the following, you must instantly walk away. The advice is along these lines: “writers need to read. If you’re reading, you’re writing.” Anything like that is toxic. The reason it is so powerful is that the first sentence is unquestionable true. If you can’t read, chances are you can’t write. If you don’t enjoy reading, chances are you don’t want to be a writer. And if you do want to be a writer, you need to read thousands of books just to find your own voice. It is the second part of this that kids you on. It is how radicalisation works: they start you off on stuff you can all agree about, and then gradually erode common sense until they are talking rubbish but they have you in an unquestioning frame of mind in which you soak up the rubbish as though it were just common sense.

Reading and writing are not the same thing. If you are currently reading a book about some famous person you might one day want to write about, you are not writing. Even worse than that, all you are doing is reading the hard work put in by an actual writer who has already written a book and got it published about the very person you thought you would write about. This is madness.

In case you wonder why I am so motivated to lecture you like this, you may rest easy. In this piece, the you is really I. It is I who need reminding that reading is not writing and I am going to stick it to the wall above my desk right now.