This month, its all about the question: How has being a writer changed your experience as a reader?
In high school, I took a creative writing class taught
by a poet during which we had to
keep a writing journal we passed in every couple of weeks for grading. We’d get it back with comments in the margins.
During a study hall one day, I was writing my journal
and I happened to look out the window to see bare trees, which led to a little
poem that started something like this: “The spindly fingers of the leafless
tree stretch into a sunless sky…
I didn’t give the poem another thought until I received my
journal back from the teacher after the next grading cycle. Beside that first
line of the poem she’d written: “I wish I wrote that.” Given that I remember it all these years later, I guess you could say I was tickled.
That little story sums up how writing has changed my
experience as a reader. I constantly stop, reread, marvel and think, “I wish I
wrote that.”
Take this gem from the book I’m currently reading,
Mother of Pearl, by Melinda Haynes. At the top of page two, I had to stop
because of this:
He had never known such
colors. Never dreamed brown was such a
rainbow. He’d always thought of brown as brown, the color or burnt toast or
worn-out shoes. But after months on end he’d learned to parcel out the values
into new shades fast approaching the limit of his imagination—Ten-minute Tea.
Steeped-Too-Long Tea. Barely Tea. Wet Bark.
Sun-Baked Bark. Old-as-Sin
Bark. Old Soggy Leaves. Just-Dropped Leaves. Fresh Wet Leaves. And these were just the browns. He had yet to
go on to green, which he was just now beginning to see. Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes.
It strikes me that in order to write about colors that way, the author had to see them that way, somehow, somewhere, and then translate it into words. Oh, yes. I'd be over the moon if I came up with something like that.
How brilliant one must be to create even a single paragraph
remotely resembling the one above. I respect that talent. I strive for that
skill. And yet, even if I never make it,
it’s all good.
At the very least, reading good writing feeds my soul.
