Reader, Writer, Writer, Reader

 

Has being a writer changed the way you read? What are you reading now?

Familiar with the image of the snake eating its own tail?

 

It’s called the ouroboros, and it’s also a concise metaphor for neurosis and obsession. A Hungarian scientist named August Kekulé saw the mythological creature in a dream, and it inspired his model of benzene. Instead of a linear chain of carbon atoms, Kekulé imagined a circle, and dashes around the hexagon indicated the type of bonds between the atoms. The next breakthrough in organic chemistry would come from George Olah who would prove that those carbon bonds were positively charged, but I digress.

 

Read. Write. Write. Read. 

To eat or not to eat your own tail, that is the question if you’re a writer.

Reader. Writer,. Writer. Reader.

 

I can’t speak for other writers, but I started out as a Reader, and Writer came much later in my life. Some of my peers inhaled M&Ms, and wrote their first novel with a crayon. That wasn’t me.

 

I read for pleasure, for escape, and entertainment. I was an omnivore, and that’s because I was curious and I didn’t know genre and marketing. I was young and free, untainted by the family business we call publishing. I was lucky that school had not turned me off of reading. My teachers taught me a vocabulary, such as Irony, Symbolism, Theme, and critical theory. Creativity I developed,

 

I could have remained linear: become versions of me growing old as a Reader inside my own Matrix.

 

Or I could choose to become ouroboros, and be both: Reader and Writer. I could Read and Enjoy for its own sake, or Read and feed my own creativity. Whatever I decided, I knew that I needed to stabilize the bonds, find a balance between Pleasure and Work.

 

I learned two things.

 

What you enjoy is unique to you, for whatever reason, be it personality, psychology, or heritage.

 

You are influenced by everything you read; it’s subliminal and impossible to avoid. Our eyes see images; our mind makes metaphors. We need to understand the world around us. Awareness is what keeps us safe and engaged, so what I am saying that we read ALL THE TIME whether it’s a book, the billboard, or the sketchy dude across the street. What we do with what feeds our eyes is intellectual, a study of our own thoughts.

 

My unsolicited advice to the Writer is this:

Appreciate the writers you enjoy, analyze what they do well, but transform it.

Turn off Analytical Mode. Don’t read as if you’re a competitor. It’s one thing for the snake to eat its own tail, another to choke on it.

Instead of seeing circularity as repetition and a torment, find that Stability between reading as a Reader, and writing as a Writer. You are both at once.

 

And to the question about change: you are a different person from the person who started reading this page, a different reader than you were as a kid; and you’re a better writer today than yesterday or last year. To quote Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

 

What am I reading now?

Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.