Reading as a writer

Being a writer has profoundly changed me as a reader. I enjoy reading more, because I appreciate how hard it is to write. The words glittering in front of my eyes, stringing themselves endlessly, nearly flawlessly, one after another across the page did not come free, without a price. They were born from sweat and tears and surely joy as well. Perhaps before I became a writer I took them for granted. A book was a book. I struggled to see the person behind the words. Or didn’t even bother to see them at all. Now it’s all I see. I see someone hunched over a computer fiddling with sentences, excited when one comes nicely together. I picture how I might have handled a particular sentence, paragraph or chapter. When I read nonfiction, I appreciate the reporting that went into a book. Often I’m amazed by it, such as when I read Seabiscuit. But the biggest difference in reading books as a writer is the range of them that I enjoy. I no longer read for pure story. The story is no longer the end to be sought. It is the words themselves that I enjoy the most, that I pay the most attention to. Like poetry, it’s no so much what the poem is about, although it sometimes is. The meaning lies in the way words sound, the way they dance depending on which one comes before and after it, and the afterglow when they’re all finally strung together. It is the language itself that means something, that, whether we want to admit it or not, affects us the most.