You write what you read
Want to know what kind of writer you are or might be? Look to your bookshelf for a hint.
At the start of this year I cleared out my bookshelf. I went full Marie-fucking-Kondo on it. If a book didn’t resonate on the level of love, connection (to the story, the physical copy, or the time it was read), or genuine on-the-reading-list-for-this-year interest, it was out.
And those “Can’t Get Past Chapter One of the Top Best-Selling Best Most Awarded Book You’ll Ever Read” books*? Fucking out.
Needless to say, I had a very bloated shelf. The main culprits:
Smart 90s literary fiction by East Coast intelligentsia offloaded by two emigrating friends
Smart books I bought because they’d won awards
Books I bought “To Support”
Books I’d been gifted that I was never going to read
Books left by my exes
Books people had offloaded because You Really Should Read This No Please Just Take It
Books I’d bought at book stores because I felt guilty about just ambling about and not buying anything In This Economy How Are Booksellers Meant to Survive (technically these could fall into the books bought “to support” but that category is about the author)
So as you can imagine there was a lot.
Once everything I’d pulled had gone to secondhand bookstores and drop-off points, I was left with a bookshelf that my 16-year-old self would’ve recognised and loved.
Everything was magic realism, urban and high fantasy, historical fiction, magic and alchemy, fairy tales, adventure and explorer stories, the supernatural and myth-making … in short, books that took – and take – me away from present realities.
I don’t know what magic happened in that process, but it shifted something in me that felt like “allowing”. Like, oh right, I actually love XYZ, it’s embedded in my reading DNA, so I don’t have to try to be someone who writes ABC.
I’ve been tapping into this Lee Child BBC Maestro series and he bangs on a lot about writers writing in the genre they like to read and reading in the genre they want to write. It’s something you hear writers and writing teachers say often, but I’ve always been so uncertain about this because my reading preference has always felt so eclectic in the sense that it’s never felt zoned in to one particular genre.
And yet, looking at that new, improved bookshelf of all my books – especially those that stick from my formative reading years – it was all too clear: I was only ever going to be a writer who engages with the stories that invite the fantastical and the magical, because that’s the kind of reader I am. Less genre, sure. But a whole lot of particular vibe.
It’s not that I’ll never read a thriller or family drama, or that other types of stories don’t like to flirt with me.
Every now and then I’ll get a great thriller story that tries to pitch me an idea (“Lookit: there’s a girl, there’s a room, there’s some murder and rape and police work HOW ABOUT IT??”) or some type of family drama (“Not into dead girls? Okay, listen up, how about – and I want you to really PICTURE IT – you use your family history and turn all that trauma into a slow-burn, relationship-heavy beach read???”) and I gotta turn them down.
No thanks, story fairies. Thanks for the invite, but I’m not your gal. Move along to the next, more appropriate author and creator. I mean, have a ya seen my bookshelf?
At least for now, right? Maybe one day my tastes in reading matter will change and so my writing will veer where it directs. But I doubt it. Once you’re in fantasy magic land it doesn’t seem reasonable to leave. Besides, I like it here. I’m always delighted by where it leads me.
Anyway.
What does your bookshelf tell you about the writer you are or might be? I wonder.
Love and light, fellow Earthlings
t
*Tossing The Overstory was the one reality I had to face that still kinda burns
I am so with you on this! Magic realism , fantasy, sci-fi... these are the only works that get a rise out of me too. And I do try others... no matter how well made, they just don't hit the spot.