Once upon a time, I used to be an avid reader. I count myself blessed that my parents and teachers fostered a love of reading and didn't restrict what I read as a kid. Reading was, without a doubt, the reason why I started writing. I had access to all kinds of books (my dad was also a bookworm and bought a new paperback every week). Besides that, we frequently got boxes of books (mostly marked up copies of required reading for countless lit classes) from extended family. The books I got from family, the ones that had margins full of notes, were especially important because it gave me insight to passages and themes that would have made no sense to a ten-year-old. I'm sure if I would have tried to finish, say, A Separate Peace without any annotations, it wouldn't have resonated with me the same way.
I memorized the names of people I knew were important—Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell. I was dead set on becoming a published writer before college and I wanted to know how to make my stories longer. Then, one day, my dad brought home another box of retired high school reading. At the top of the pile was William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I instantly decided to read it. I didn't know it for a long time, but Golding's novel was the first time I'd ever thought critically. I liked that a book made me think, and I mean, really ponder. I read books so I count da dream. I didn't want to daydream about the boys on the island. So I just thought about their plight and felt a great ball of bad feelings in my stomach.
In eighth grade, I got my wisdom teeth removed. Under the mouth-numbing, brain-fogging effect of pain killers, I spent the week flipping through a book I knew confirmed my weirdo status to my mom. The Plucker, a dark, twisted, not-so-children's book by an artist named Brom became the source I literally studied in order to write concisely. This is the book that taught me how to pace plot and the best ways to write action-heavy paragraphs. Brom's writing, is, in a word, effective. Included on nearly every page are original illustrations, but even without pictures, Brom's efficient writing was enough to visualize the story. Brom was my hero because he wrote and illustrated his own book. There was nothing more I wanted at the time than to be able to do something similar. Finally, this was my first exposure to dark fantasy. I'd read fantasy novels since birth, but somehow I managed to miss an entire subgenre that appealed to me even more than what I'd read before. It opened new doors for writing.
Other books that I count among those that are near and dear to my heart are Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews, and, what is probably no surprise, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. This last one is important. Designing a character like Holden—a whining anti-hero that people seem to love or hate—was such a ballsy move because the protagonist/narrator is generally to be the person that readers want to side with. But I loved Holden. I loved his terrible attitude. I loved the way he explained things.Salinger wrote The Catcher In The Rye in1951, yet the story and its rather infamous character remain just as relevant as ever.
If I didn't read as much as I did as a kid, I wouldn't be writing today. When I don't read, my writing starts to suck, and my vocabulary dwindles. Now more than ever, people need to read books—or Kindles, or Nooks, or whatever screen the words are on. People need stories, especially ones that make them think. Critical thinking helps dfferentiate between phonies and Holdens. Don't be a phony.
