What’s going on in my world?

I was writing, writing, writing, but over the last two weeks, I’ve put down the pen and let fall silent the keys and taken up book after book.  This was at the strong encouragement of the angel of my authorship (one might say); I’ve had the good fortune over some years, you see, of a mentor from the Atlanta area guiding me through that dark forest that separates the blogger from the Writer with a capital W.

This man has a history as rich in literature as anyone can have.  A long time friend of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; he knew Faulkner and he knew Hemingway and Caroline Gordon and Robert Allen Tate before and after their famed marriage.    He has guided other writers such as the countless-times-over bestseller Karin Slaughter.  He taught at a number of prestigious universities after receiving prestigious degrees and he is an author several times over of some very important works of criticism and biography.

For years now he has given me guidance, encouragement, humility, criticism, and advice.  Most recently, his most valuable insights have been: stop writing.  Go read.

This is a mistake that many writers make and far too often and I foremost in error.  After a long morning of writing it’s so easy to toss in my Fringe Blu-Ray and recline for a bit of entertainment spoon-feeding.  Which to a degree is fine.  Decompression and entertainment have their place.  But we writers must remember to read, read, read.  To keep reaching back further and further into the history of literature and pulling titles.  Like working out at a gym, we must push the limits with each workout if we wish to grow stronger, become healthier, and not stagnate.

My friend’s advice this time around, as I work through my new “Southern” novel, was to stop congratulating myself on florid polysyndetons and put down my pen and go back and read.  Read Flaubert’s ‘A Simple Heart,’ he advised.  Write as Hemingway writing ‘The Killers.’  Read Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’  Read Gordon’s discussion of all of these and her appendices in House of Fiction (which I’ve read, but read it again). Don’t think about my own writing, don’t compare, don’t devise, and don’t worry.  Read it, let it sift through me, let it settle, and return to the the novel singing with a new voice.

It worked.  I’m back at it and writing and I’m a new writer after just a two-week exercise.  I look now with more seasoned eyes at what I’ve written before.

But the point is, as with any process of maturation, I must accept and exercise this process continually, not just when I fall into a rut.  It must be a daily discipline.  A writer who doesn’t read as much as he writes is an artist who chooses to paint in the dark.  A captain who ignores his charts.

I don’t often take the time to offer updates of much substance beyond the necessary links (sparing you, I’m sure, the pain of suffering through my diatribes).  In fact I have a great aversion to blogs and the whole concept of the blogosphere; I find it to be a self-validation machine for the chemically unbalanced and wildly opinionated (in a general way, of course.)  Since I am one of those I try to limit the voice I give to my thoughts.

Hope to see you local Macon-ites at Comics Plus this Saturday, where I will be signing.  Hope to share with you some exciting news very, very soon.

‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and un-stitching has been naught.”  -Yeats