Here’s my theory. Actually, it’s less a theory and more an observation from my own habits. Reading and writing are cyclical, and they orbit around what is going in one’s life at the time. Maybe this is obvious to most people and I’m just now beginning to realize it. However, you see it in the ways that you return to a book you read years ago, and suddenly that book opens to you in a whole new way. You interpret it with your present emotions, the conflicts that are going on at work or in your relationships. Maybe your lens of perception has been cracked or cleaned lately, and you see something in the story that you never noticed…or you see some aspect of the characters that never meant anything to you before. You relate now, and the story becomes all the more powerful.
Writing is the same. Not only do we grow in skill the more we write, we simply grow–at least, that is the hope. Writing forces us to grow, because it forces us to dig into ourselves and see how deep past the surface our thoughts and emotions go, because that’s where the inspiration and passion comes from that infuses our writing. Sure, that kind of thing also comes from outside, from other’s lives and world events. But in writing, all those things get funneled through us, and so are influenced by who we are. What if we look at ourselves and realize we are stuck in a rut? What if are going through emotional turmoil? What if everything is going splendidly and the world is our bivalve mollusk? Then our writing is going to reflect that. A book, a story…these things are a strange combination of mirrors and cameras. We writers see ourselves in them, in whatever shadowy reflection we know, but it also captures us and shows our face to the world so they see us in them as well. For a brief time, as they are reading our words, our face is interposed over theirs and they live and see through our lens of perception, however dark or bright it may be.
And so we move on, and writing inspires us to live and read so we can see through other eyes, and we then see so much we feel that undeniable impulse to let the words flow out so others can see what we have seen…and then it’s their turn to live.
I hope this makes sense. Again, maybe it’s something entirely obvious to you, one of those common sense things that few people actually think through. Why think through something that’s common sense? Because common sense seems to be so rare these days.
Anyways, to end, here are some links listing some books of note. The first is the Science Fiction Book Club’s list of the top 50 science fiction and fantasy books (of all time, of course). The second is the New York Time’s list of top 10 books of 2006…no particular genre. Have at it.
http://www.sfbc.com/doc/content/sitelets/FSE_Sitelet_Theme_2.jhtml?SID=nmsfctop50
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/review/20061210tenbestbooks.html?8bu&emc=bu
I see that smile.
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