"@TD I recently had a similar experience. I was a little further along in my story but really plodding. Writing the end suddenly helped me fill in what I miss missing. I am now a mere five outlined chapters from the end :)"
On Writing My First Novel: When Did You Fall In Love With Books?
First of all, I am at Hedgebrook, and I am very very (very!) lucky to be here. Twenty-five years ago, Seattle philanthropist Nancy Nordhoff and writer Sheryl Feldman founded this place "with a vision to nurture the voices and work of individual women w... The ambition and impact of their vision is reflected most astoundingly in its deceptively unassuming "farmhouse" library (it's a farmhouse with wifi): shelf after shelf filed with more than a thousand books written by the women who have been sheltered by its cottages, embraced by their fellow women writers, and lovingly fed at its table. There are names you know and names you don't, but these shelves contain riches of a rare kind, because they are organized not by genre but by author, and you are as likely to find "Random Family," here, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, as you are to find "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin. (I'd never heard of either and have read both while I've been here.)
I came here to write, and so I have. But part of me wonders if I wasn't truly called here to remember what it was like to read with the single-minded passion of a teenager in love. Each night I stand in the midst of this library and look and look, thinking, what will I read next? And then I carry the precious book home with me in a basket, get in bed by 8:30 or 9, and read till one o'clock in the morning--if, that is, I can get myself to turn out the light.
Do you remember the last time you read like that? Maybe you still do. But for me it's been awhile. And it's brought back some of my most vivid and pleasurable memories, memories of falling completely, utterly in love with books.
For me, my mother's bookshelves were the font to which I returned again and again to be replenished when a book was done and I was ready for another. Her shelves held the variety and opportunities for discovery that only a personal library can, with titles from her years as a "Book of The Month Club" subscriber (ah "Giant," "Exodus," and "Rebecca"!) volumes from her foray into graduate school (a heavily notated copy of "Ulysses", Hardy, Faulkner, Hemingway, the Brontes, and every single volume of Austen), and tattered paperbacks representing her middle-grade tastes ("The Virginian" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"). Upon finishing one book, I would descend the stairs into the living room, ready to begin my search for another, and the memory of standing in front of those shelves, looking, looking, still elicits a feeling of excitement and anticipation. Sometimes I would ask my mother questions. But mostly I would handle them, their covers, their spines; I would run my hands across their skins, open them up, flip through their pages, even read aloud, sometimes, if I was alone, their first pages.
And then I would choose, and, book under my arm, retreat back into my room, where I would stay with that book for hours.
Do you remember when you first chose one book from many, without recommendations or interference, to take to your bed or your desk or your couch? Was it taken from a personal library, the library of a family member or friend? Or was it from a library in your neighborhood or at school? Did you have a ritual for choosing what to read next? Do you remember when you thought: I will never get enough, and thank god there will always be more!
This may not, on the face of it, appear to be a blogpost about writing my first novel. But in this journey I have come to believe that one reason writers get better with age is that it takes years to read enough books to be ready. To read until you are like a classical guitarist with a physical memory for your instrument as powerful, or more so, than the dictates of your conscious mind; to read so much you know words as well as a carpenter knows wood.
Hedgebrook is many things, but everything it is comes down to a love of books. So please, if you have a minute, tell me about the beginnings of your love affair. Today, I'm in the mood for romance.
Comment
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Comment by Valerie Deering on July 28, 2012 at 7:42am -
I absolutely LOVE these words, "....one reason writers get better with age is that it takes years to read enough books to be ready. To read until you are like a classical guitarist with a physical memory for your instrument as powerful, or more so, than the dictates of your conscious mind; to read so much you know words as well as a carpenter knows wood." Thank you Kamy.
My reading love affair goes back as far as I can remember. I, too, read Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. Those authors gave way to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys which then evolved into my love of Agatha Christie as an adolescent. Soon enough, I became enthralled by Truman Capote and Stephen King and all things demented. Now, I love memoir and creative non-fiction.
I appreciate you so much! Thank you! Val.
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Comment by Suzanne McKenna Link on July 27, 2012 at 9:11pm -
I consumed Beverly Cleary books as a kid, then Judy Blume. As a lover of horses, I read Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty and many others. Now I love to find books, as Kamy said above, without recommendations and interference. I enjoy finding a diamond in the rough!
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Comment by Margaret Wacker on July 26, 2012 at 3:29pm -
I think you have a great point. Many of us came to learn the love of books young. I know I did. (Though I wasn't as young as a friend of mine who claims her prematurity was due to the poor lighting and limited number of available books in her mother's womb. I know mine was simply due to impatience.) Some of my earliest memories are browsing the books at the library or the bookstore. Even now my house is home to huge numbers of books, on shelves, in boxes, even in piles on the floor. I think that it takes years of reading and living life before many are able to write. I know it has for me, despite my impatience about everything in life.
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Comment by Dera R Williams on July 25, 2012 at 10:45am -
My mother, a school teacher, took us to the library every Saturday and in order to get a library card, you had to know how write your name. So, at four years old I learned and check out the maximum five books at a time. We also had a bookcase full of books at home and as I got older, I started partaking. There was no censorship and I read some of everything; James Baldwin, Jacquelin Susann and Xaviera Hollander. Fortunately, my love of reading was passed down to my daughter and hopefully, my 21 month-old granddaughter.
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Comment by Geri Givens Taylor on July 25, 2012 at 8:10am -
I remember going to the library for summer reading programs as a child and getting a bee stamp on a card for every book I read. I thought the bees looked rather scary but I enjoyed getting a whole card full and still remember many of the books I read.
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Comment by Penny Manson on July 25, 2012 at 8:05am -
Dear Kamy, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. From the 1st grade teacher who argued that I couldn't read yet when I told her I already could, to the love affair with sci-fi books culminating in one of Ray Bradbury's books signed for me, books and the libraries that house them have always been my joy and refuge. This is still true today. When life as a caregiver gets hard, I lose myself for awhile in something new or one of my old favorites which has been read so often it must be handled gently or fall apart in my hands.
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Comment by State of the Art on July 25, 2012 at 7:43am -
Do you remember summer reading lists? At the end of each school year, we would get a list of 32 books, all classics, (for some reason that number sticks in my brain) and my ambition each summer was to read every one of them. I had a wonderful Victorian-era public library in Vermont with all the books in original bindings, illustrated with engravings and that see-through tissue paper. It was like delving into the 19th Century in a very physical way. I'd finish one and start another without a break--sometimes lying under a tree with plum in hand or staying up too late in bed after my bedtime trying to hide the lamp light. I plowed my way through all of Louisa May Alcott, lots of Dickens (skipping all the descriptive paragraphs), all of Bronte, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy's War and Peace & Anna Karenina. Some get better with time--like Anna Karenina. Others I'm wise enough not to revisit--Babbitt anyone? I wouldn't want to break the spell.
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Comment by Carole Spearin McCauley on July 25, 2012 at 6:13am -
Dear Kamy, Glad to know about Hedgebrook. Hope your writing is going well. Good wishes from Carole in NH
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Comment by Marcie Bridges on July 24, 2012 at 3:35pm -
I fell in love with books in 1983 when I was 8 years old. I read Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's me Margaret and was intrigued by all of the teenage things in that book -- periods, boyfriends, fighting and making up with your BFF. I read it over and over and over and....
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Comment by Ginny NiCarthy on July 24, 2012 at 3:05pm -
I fell in love with reading and writing about the age of eight, and my favorite book was Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. That was surely my first memoir (of the doll named Hitty) and my first encounter with adventures on land and sea, now called travel books. The first story I wrote, at about that same age, was about a girl’s pencil. The unfortunate pencil was put through several emotional wringers when her owner ground her down in the sharpener, lost her in a field of tall grass and nibbled away at her eraser. (Fortunately, Hitty didn’t sue me for plagiarizing her own high adventures.) So it shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve just finished writing my book, Seeing for Myself: A Political Traveler’s Memoir.
The fictional, intellectual or travel adventure I covet in reading is frequently accompanied by a sensual attachment to the physical book itself. This is what I wrote about that in my blog (at nicarthyadventures): “I sometimes catch myself prematurely mourning the possible demise of the book, as we know it. I know it best as a collection of several hundred pages tucked into an artful cover, soft and pliable enough to fit the spine into my left palm as, with my right hand I riffle the pages. I start reading, entering a new world, turning each page, one at a time, some times fast, impatient to find out what comes next, sometimes slowly, as I ruminate about complex ideas. I know the book as a friend whose pages I can dog-ear, or mark with underlines, or scribbles of my delight or rage at the content. When I've reluctantly reached the end of a book that's transported me to a new world of fiction or a deepened understanding of reality, I'm likely to caress it.
I surely will adapt to reading some e-books eventually, but that will not mean giving up paper books as my mainstay of reading matter. I continue to judge books not only by their covers, and their content, but by the sensual gift of the pages themselves.
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