Essential reading : From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with myself and which teaches me how to live and die well (Montaigne)

Write-Only

Posted by Richard Brody

I blame school.

In her post yesterday at The Book Bench, Macy Halford mentions that the novelist William Giraldi says he prefers reading to writing, and adds:

He teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge to read. This strikes him as crazy. “There’s an analogy there that I haven’t been able to complete,” he said:

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.

Really: I blame school. The practice of reading has become disturbingly technocratic. My daughters, who are teen-agers, attended good New York City public schools and had many excellent teachers. Yet both spent their dozen years in school reading books with a stack of Post-Its in hand to flag passages and with printed diagrams beside them to fill in with aspects of plot, character, affect, and style. The literary side of their education was better suited to training a lawyer—or, for that matter, a professor of education—than to developing a desire for reading.

As for reading in general, it’s a subset of living, not a substitute for it, and the reverence with which it's mentioned suggests precisely the grade-conscious habits of good students—whom teachers have instilled with the habit of doing, outside of school, things that are good for school or similar to school. That’s why some authors who exhbit an irresistible urge to read lack the range of experience and the wildness of temperament displayed by many writers who are less-than-patient or less-than-omnivorous readers. And it’s no surprise that students increasingly don’t want to read—to the extent that the rejection of reading implies the rejection of what reading has become in the hands of educators whose mandate is to train students rather than to cultivate their aesthetic passions. (The increasing importance of standardized testing is one of the most grievous obstacles to actual education.)

There are as many ways of being a good writer as there are good writers; there are bibliophiles and adventurers, volcanos and jewellers, wanderers and homebodies.

At the moment, wanting to write without wanting to read is something like wanting to play baseball without learning to read an M.R.I. When schools approach reading as something that stirs the emotions and the imagination rather than the synapses, the activity will become more popular—and those of the artistic temperament will find themselves to have been fuelled by it rather than oppressed by it.

P.S. I’ll be on the road next week and in touch a little more sporadically.