Category Archives: Reading

Words, words, words

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If you want to succeed as a writer, you have to read. All the advice from the experts is the same: Read. Make time for it; enjoy it; learn from it.

Discovering a new author is thrilling; I have to read their entire back catalogue as soon as possible. The excitement I get from reading a truly great book is, funnily enough, beyond words. It’s one of the most satisfying things I know. I couldn’t put it better than Holden Caulfield, J D Salinger’s protagonist in ‘Catcher in the Rye.’

‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

Obviously, I’m endeavouring to be that special author, but simultaneously I’m a devoted reader and it all takes time, which I never have quite enough of. I wish there were 26 hours in a day and 8 days in a week. I wish I was independently wealthy and didn’t need to go to work – it seriously impedes my writerly progress.

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Accents and Dialects

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An accent is an individual mode of pronunciation often associated with a particular locale. A dialect is a form of speech peculiar to a district, usually employing colloquial vocabulary specific to that geographical area.  In fact, George Bernard Shaw once observed that, England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

For such a small geographical area, the United Kingdom has hundreds of dialects, many existing almost side by side but sounding like different languages. I come from Yorkshire, a county once divided into three Ridings; East, West and North (Riding is an old term meaning a third – the South Riding that Winifred Holtby wrote about was fictitious), where the local dialect can be very thick. I’ve lived elsewhere in the country, and in the US, and the rough edges have been smoothed, but whenever I return to Yorkshire, I fall back into the accent and dialect without a second thought.

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Reading and Writing

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They’re in constant competition. Sofa, cup of tea, book, is my default position. I already get up an hour earlier to shoehorn some more reading time into my day and I often sit up with a book late into the night. But a serious writing addiction requires serious amounts of time and commitment, and it’s a daily struggle to achieve a balance. Lunch hours become ten minute breaks, the rest of the time spent scribbling plotlines or mulling over new characters.

I snatch odd minutes here and there in the evenings. It’s true what everyone says: foregoing an hour of television every night means I’ll have a substantial piece of work by the end of the year. It’s not easy, summoning the muse when the moment dictates, but it’s a skill I’m learning. If I’m not making any progress with the novel I’ll spend the time exercising my writing muscles in a different direction, like a short story.

But back to the conundrum: we writers must read, read, read to hone our skills. How can we hope to write with style, elegance and panache if we haven’t studied the masters of the craft?