How to Be an Author: THINK LIKE A READER

For the past two weeks I’ve been sick with what the doctor called walking pneumonia. Between the wheezing, coughing and attempting to catch my breath, I haven’t been doing too much walking. It’s also difficult to concentrate, when your body gyrates from the explosive convulsion of impacted lungs. Without concentration, I’ve found my ability to write has been limited to blogging twice a week and attempting to write a few words in my journal each day. My journal is for my eyes only (Believe me, there’s nothing there you’d want to see.).

As the title above suggests and as I’ve written about previously, it is important for writers to be readers. I find reading takes my mind off of what ails me when I’m sick. It doesn’t stop the squeaky noise my lungs make as I gasp for the next breath nor shorten the duration of my hacking, but in between it lets me dwell on other people’s problems instead of my own. I think it’s called vicarious relief.

In a previous blog I mentioned how much I was enjoying Samuel Miller’s debut novel, A Lite Too Bright. The first two hundred pages took me nearly four weeks, but once I became ill I raced through the final two hundred in a few days. Then, I delved into how a fourteen-year-old girl who fell into the world of drugs and became estranged from her family survived a two-month rehab in the desert program. Wendelin Van Draanen’s Wild Bird was a page-turner that took me only a few days to complete.

For my next speed reading story, I picked one I’ve read dozens of times. My copy of Catcher in the Rye is fifty years old and held together by several layers of Scotch tape. Holden Caulfield took me from his acne covered friends at the prep school where he’d been kicked out to his encounter with nuns on a train, running into friends of his brother D.B. at a night club where he was too young, to a date with the lovely Sally Hayes with whom he had nothing in common, to waking up with a strange hand stroking his head, to his talking his little sister Phoebe out of running away with him to his refusing to tell the psychoanalyst who has been listening to him ramble for the two-hundred-sixteen pages anymore. When I finished it in record time of just under three days I realized how depressing Holden is and how it didn’t qualify as an elixir for my illness.

Currently, I’m reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld’s Sasquatch in the Paint. I’m about half way through the story of a nerd who has a growth spurt and is faced with a choice of remaining the science geek, expanding into the world of basketball, or attempting to do both…and maybe spreading himself too thin to be successful at either. It’s not depressing and it seems to handle the bounce of my coughs pretty well.

As always your comments are welcomed and appreciated.