You can’t survive today on what you ate last week. What does that mean for the writer? Besides that he must eat semi-regularly to fuel his body, he must also read to fuel his creativity. Sure, I’ve read thousands of books in my life, but I haven’t read all that many lately. My reading this year has been limited mostly to short and serialized fiction. I’ve watched and analyzed television and movies also. But I’m not a television writer. I’m an unpublished novelist. I need to read novels.
So, it’s time for a reading plan. Before me I have works by Alan Dean Foster, Greg Rucka, Orson Scott Card, Elmore Leonard, as well as other selections not to be named. (Hey, Danielle Steele and Nicholas Sparks are terrific writers. Hold on, let me verify that. Okay, Danielle Steele is a terrific writer). The television is unplugged. The DVDs are packed up. The podcast aggregator is uninstalled. And the media files–all legally obtained, thank you very much–are removed from my PC and transferred to not-easily-accessible external hard drives.
For the next month, it’s nothing but novels. No media will be consumed that is not in the form of the written word. There, I feel better.
Wait, do audio books count?
