Reading and Writing—Two Essentials for a Happy Writer!

This week Edge Author Dave Cousins asks how much does the ability to write, depend on your dedication as a reader.

Finding time to write alongside the demands of a family and a job—even if that job is being a writer—can be a balancing act. Before I was fortunate enough to be published and had to squeeze writing time into early starts, late nights, train journeys and lunch breaks, I sometimes found that I didn't have time to read. Free time was so scare, it seemed more important to spend it creating my own stories rather than reading somebody else's. I eventually found that logic to be somewhat flawed – in my case at least. Now I firmly agree with Stephen King, who said, “If you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

It may look like I'm taking it easy with a book.
In reality this is an intensive training workout!

Over the years I’ve noticed that when I’m not reading every day, my writing flows less freely. An obvious analogy would be the sporting one: that reading is an important part of maintaining a level of writing fitness, like an athlete training every day. When I’m reading a lot, my writing feels natural, instinctive – fitter, if you like. Or as The King puts it: “Constant reading will pull you into a place where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.” For me, it’s about filling my subconscious with words and stories – the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs, the pace of a well spun yarn.

“Every successful writer I know is also a great reader.” – Robert Cormier

When I started to write, I worried that my own stories, or rather my voice, would start to sound like whatever I was reading, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I find that reading somebody else's words helps to clear my head, and stops me thinking about my own for a while, so I'm fresher when I return.

But what about you? Here at the Edge we are always interested to hear other people’s experience. How does reading sit alongside your writing? Does it help? Does it interfere? Does it matter what you read? Leave a comment in the box below and let us know. Thanks.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of posts you might enjoy by fellow Edge authors on a similar theme:

Reading For My Writing by Miriam Halahmy

Writing Tips Part 6 by Sara Grant

Dave Cousins is the author (and sometimes illustrator!) of a number of award-winning books for young people. Visit www.davecousins.net for more info.

The Edge, an uncomfortable place to be … by guest author, Celia Rees

This week we are delighted to welcome award-winning author, Celia Rees as our guest at the Edge.

I have to thank Miriam Halahmy for introducing me to The Edge and asking me if I’d like to contribute to a site devoted to ‘Sharp fiction for young adults and teens’. I have always believed that there is a place for just this kind of fiction, positioned between children’s books and fully adult writing, offering a staging post, a stepping stone between the two. It is a vitally important, necessary fiction, but a tricky area. The Edge can be an uncomfortable place. Get it WRONG and you will be accused of preaching, patronizing, being out of touch in an embarrassing ‘Dad Dancing’ way. Get it RIGHT and you might delight the readers but dismay the gatekeepers and risk not being published at all.

Tricky lot, older teens.

I began writing as a response to just this difficult group. I was an English teacher and my 14 – 16 year old students seemed to have turned themselves off reading because, they said, there was nothing for them, nothing that reflected life as they experienced it. They were almost adults, but the fiction on offer did not treat them that way. There wasn’t much to intrigue, engage, engross them on a grown up level. This didn’t mean that they read nothing. 

There were authors they consumed with great appetite. American authors like Robert Cormier, Lois Duncan, Patricia Windsor and Ursula Le Guin but their output was relatively small and when these readers wanted to, they could read fast. It seemed to me that what these writers had in common was an ability to write exciting, genre fiction with teenage characters at the centre of the action but with added value. These books were uncompromising, not just in subject matter but also in the complexity of the story telling, the way they were written. I liked that. I enjoyed reading these books myself and that is still my test. If I enjoy the book as an adult reader, it is YA. If I don’t. it’s not. A rough rule of thumb, biased I know, but there it is.

My first novel, Every Step You Take, was based on a true story about a group of students from another comprehensive school in the city who got mixed up in a murder hunt. I wrote it like a thriller because I knew that was a popular genre (and I like thrillers) but it had ‘added value’: strong themes - a continuum of male violence from date abuse and rape to murder and powerful female characters (these were the days of early Val McDermid and V.I. Warshawski).

My latest novel, This Is Not Forgiveness, is also a contemporary thriller, taking in events happening now, soldiers returning from Afghanistan, post traumatic stress disorder, other kinds of social disorder, all mixed into the complexities and stresses of 21st Century teenage life. I’ve written in a lot of other genre, notably historical fiction and horror, but I’ve always kept those first principles in mind: strong stories, added extras, keep it real, be honest, don’t patronize. Even with all that, you still might not get it right…

The Edge can be a difficult place and uncomfortable, but then how comfortable should it be?

For more information please visit Celia's website, her official Facebook Fan Page, or follow her on Twitter @CeliaRees. 

Huge thanks to Celia for being this week's guest author at The Edge.

Where do your ideas come from?

Edge author Dave Cousins considers why he is drawn to write edgy fiction. 

Where do your ideas come from? is probably the most common question asked of writers, and one that many will struggle to answer. Not me. I know exactly where my stories originate: a metal box on my desk called the Word Tin. It contains all the words I need, stamped into small strips of metal, like dog-tags. To build a story, I simply delve into the box, pull out a handful of words and put them in the right order – easy. 

The Word Tin: Where the words come from

I’m joking, of course – though the tin is real, and I have once or twice tried the technique. (It produced some interesting if not exactly publishable results.) But where do ideas for stories come from? How do we choose which stories to tell? Does choice even come into it? I certainly don’t sit down and think. ‘Right! Now I’m going to write some edgy fiction.’ Why don’t I tell stories about boy wizards or teenage spies – vampires even? I’m a big fan of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series and will happily spend an evening reading about Neutrino-toting fairies, but when I sit down to write, that’s not what appears on the page.

The late great (and edgy) Robert Cormier

For me, Robert Cormier summed it up perfectly when he said, ‘to work for me, an idea must be attached to an emotion, something that upsets, dazzles or angers me and sends me to the typewriter’. The spark that sent me to my notebook to scribble the start of the story that became 15 Days without a Head, came from something I witnessed in a pub one afternoon. A very drunk woman arguing with a stranger at the next table – much to the embarrassment of her sons. It made me wonder what life was like for those two boys, what would happen when they got home. 

It takes time to write and revise a novel, and I find that if the characters and their story don’t mean anything to me, they won’t sustain my interest through the months of writing. If you care, it also brings with it a sense of responsibility, a desire to do justice to the characters and their story, which can be a great motivation – especially in those dark hours encountered with every novel, where the story won’t come and you find yourself reaching for the Word Tin! 

Last week, Bryony talked about edgy fiction dealing with unsettling, uncomfortable ideas. Look at all the Edge story synopses and you’ll find a wide range of tales that have one thing in common: they all deal with realities that are hard to face, things we would rather not think about: knife crime, child abduction, prejudice and torture, abandonment, deception and coercion. 

But these are the subjects that excite and unsettle me, that gnaw away at my subconscious, disturb my daydreams and keep me awake at night – the things that drive me to the typewriter. 

15 Days without a Head by Dave Cousins, is out in January 2012, published by Oxford University Press.