Reading inspired me, but now it holds me back
Love for the art form ought not hold us back from participation in it.
I have a problem with writing.
and it has to do with what inspired me to start in the first place.
Reading.
I’ll flip through books I have lying around, get lost in hyper-link mazes on my favorite blogs, or read interview transcripts of authors I enjoy.
The internet gives me full access to the tantalizing world of what other people are doing. There’s inspiration to be found everywhere.
It’s a problem now because it detracts from my writing and I’d thought it justified.
Perhaps like many, I was first inspired to read more by encountering great ideas which helped me to live and think better.
I got hooked on absorbing the insights which inspired better thinking. It wasn’t until later I recognized many authors give credit to writing itself which allows them to think more clearly and develop their ideas.
No longer do these authors have something I don’t, I can satiate my own appetite. I can become an effective thinker on my own. I can improve my mind, develop my own ideas, and maybe even have some useful ideas one day. It was time to pick up the pen and write for myself.
I want to explore this identity. I love putting words on a page to witness my development as a thinker over time. I also seek the long-term creative pursuit and the benefits it will bring into my life.
Yet the shift of going from a consumer of something I love to becoming one who produces work is much messier than I had first assumed.
Reading fills me with inspiration, and there’s lots of advice for creatives that tells them to use their inspirations as an advantage. Yet what I’ve experienced thus far is a greater need to wrestle them off of me rather than immersing further into them.
This is my attempt to work it out.
First, a clarification on how I view writing:
My primary use has always been in what I extract through the process; better thinking. However there is also its inescapable tie as an art; it’s an expression of me. Anything I write will have a small piece of creative identity within it. As a result, I am pulled in two directions: to develop good thinking, and to develop creative distinction.
The co-dependency of reading
While I could easily write the concise, habit-based approach to fix my problem of “I need to write more instead of reading”. I’m attempting to see how I can make writing more inherently motivating.
Reading is passive absorption: it fills your mind.
Writing is active engagement: it’s how we think things through.
We assume that to write about something we have to know it, but it’s actually the process of coming to understand what we’re writing about.
When I don’t know what to think about something, the easier option to feel as if I understand is to read. This feels productive, I’m getting informed on the topic and I’m seeing the words used to express an idea. I may even be able to regurgitate the words to someone else and they might assume I understand the topic well.
This is too easy.
When we read we can easily skip thinking for ourselves, leading us to the illusion we’re learning more than we are. The first epiphany I had in writing was seeing just how weak my understanding of ideas were. I couldn’t explain, in my own words, any of the things I thought I knew. I’d been inspired, I’d still had loads of ideas because of reading, but my own ability to structure, clarify, and strengthen those ideas had been left underdeveloped. My thinking muscles didn’t grow as much as they could because I allowed others to do the heavy lifting for me.
The relationship between reading and writing feed into each other for us to learn. but we have to recognize when it’s holding too much of the weight for us. We need exposure to ideas, but we have to be aware that these are ideas which have been worked through by other people. 1
Writing is a negotiation between other people’s ideas and how you understand them. As a tool for thinking, it allows me to evaluate what I’m reading; it stops me from passively absorbing the surface of an idea and start working to understand it deeply. This is the beginning of thinking on our own.
Reading isn’t enough on its own to improve our thinking. We have to write.
Inspiration molds but it can also suffocate
Aside from strictly thinking, we may read to get inspiration. We don’t want how to think but perhaps what to think about. We need a direction to aim our writing and this kind of reading can act as a scaffold rather than a crutch.
Yet of course, I find a way to struggle with this as well: my inspirations impress upon me too much. Great work is inspiring, but it also has a strong mental pull.
My taste as a consumer and style as a creator isn’t easily brought into harmony. As my taste develops, I love higher degrees of polish and research in my reading. When I write—at lower complexity and clarity—I can find my own projects less captivating than what I would read. I’ll often find beautiful prose in my research and feel inspired, to write about a similar idea, but it isn’t quite me, and I may feel discouraged by a poor imitation. I don’t yet have the muscles to chew on what I want to bite.
Of course I know it’s a losing game to compare, but it can be much harder in practice. As a beginner I often want some kind of benchmark to judge my progress and get feedback. The most available thing to me is the finished products of what other people have written, if I always use this I can easily fixate on the difference in skill.
I know I’ll get there, but in the meantime if I constantly need other people’s ideas as inspiration, I won’t make anything that feels like me. I need distance from their pull.
I used to think if I absorbed enough influences, I could eventually synthesize something new. But writing doesn’t work that way. My voice isn’t a patchwork of others; it’s always been here. It’s just weaker and drowned out by the influences I’m immersed in.
This might be a primary reason artists struggle to find their own voice. I don’t think it’s about being inspired into one, as we might assume. It appears to be more about finding enough quiet to hear your own thoughts, then strengthening them.
Perhaps once I have written enough to stand on my own I can supplement inspiration from others without overstretching or losing track of my voice. Until then, distance and quiet do me better to unveil the creative shadow from over me.
Sirens may inspire you; but they will drown you in their song.
How can I cultivate my voice?
While I’m stuck between the needs to think for myself, reading into topics to learn more about them, and removing myself enough from the source to write in my own voice, I procrastinate the basics. Improving my actual skill in writing. I imagine with more skill, I’ll better hold my ground from these forces pulling me.
I don’t have a perfect solution, and a full dive into skill acquisition is for another day, but here’s the exact example of what I’m trying:
Write about the problems you’re facing.
As a writer, your craft is a process of structuring your thinking, so, write down the things you need to think through.
This essay began because anything I wrote this month circled back into the same dead-ends. My consumer taste pulled me into tackling larger projects with research, but then I procrastinate or keep changing my topics by reading. Then anything I attempted felt wrong, like it was less anything which I had to say and more reporting on others. I’ve identified the problems above as what bothered me. My high dose of reading and subsequent impressionability drowned me out in other people’s work.
Even though I’m deeply interested by the topics I research, I found I’m not yet ready to write about them in my own voice. I quickly become overwhelmed as I don’t have much practice with structuring the larger projects. Here I opted for a more distant topic (than what I read) for which I could hear myself in.
Now I have words flowing out of my keyboard instead of wringing a dried lemon. Rather than read myself deeper into the sirens of the sea, I’m writing to keep myself afloat. A difficult personal problem for which research does me no good is just the project I needed to get me out of the books and into my desk chair.
Breaking the fantasy
It’s easy to want to be a rockstar when you see the raving enjoyment of concerts and stage performances. But the dream alone isn’t what got anyone onto a stage. It was their love of the process, the toiling away in a studio, the uncomfortable lack of a spark on some days, and the obsession with their craft that paved the road to fulfilling their reality. Our fantasies let us escape into proximity (artificial though it is) with what we want. Just as listening to music won’t make you any better a musician. It will develops your taste, it will influence you, but it doesn’t build. We have to keep in mind to plug our ears sometimes to work on the craft. Otherwise, we won’t make it happen.2
Just as the musician listening to music, my immersion in reading gives me the joy of what I have always and will continue to love. But now that I want to write, it is that identity which I must feed and cultivate. I have to wrestle off the desire to immerse myself in inspirations as a shortcut to being close with them. I can’t allow my constant reading to feed the fantasy of “one day will write something this good” Even though reading was my inspiration to start in the first place, I have to wake up out of my dream and get to the reality of writing.
The reality is tedious and painful, but that’s just the process we must go through. If I want to keep courting this new identity, I have to love all of her. Not just the fantasy of her. And who knows, perhaps she could be the one, the identity which I find that there is nothing else I’d rather be. Either way if it works out, it’s because we love the process of writing, not just the dream of it.
I certainly won’t ever give up reading, but from now on, I have something which might become even more dear to me for which I must attend to.
Thanks for reading,
Keaton.
Shopenhauer inspired this one:
"When we read, someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. … Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. … It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own. … Just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the constant sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts.”