The Art of Reading

By J.D. Cunegan

Sometimes, it feels like everyone's got some advice for how to write.

 

But what about how to read?

 

A full library can be a writer's best friend, and reading plays a far bigger role in the creative process and a writer's productivity than you might think. Stephen King, international bestseller and uber-productive wordsmith, said it best in his book On Writing, when he argued for the importance of reading, and The Art of Reading dives deeper into just why that is.

 

J.D. Cunegan (Bounty, Notna) examines how a healthy reading habit can feed and sustain a productive and successful life as a writer. The Art of Reading will not tell you how to write, but it will show you how reading can help you improve as a writer.

 

After all, most of us fell in love with creating because of something we read, right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.D. Cunegan
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393973164

J.D. Cunegan

J.D. Cunegan is known for his unique writing style, a mixture of murder mystery and superhero epic that introduces the reader to his comic book-inspired storytelling and fast-paced prose. A 2006 graduate of Old Dominion University, Cunegan has an extensive background in journalism, a lengthy career in media relations, and a lifelong love for writing. Cunegan lives in Hampton, Virginia, and next to books, his big passion in life in auto racing. When not hunched in front of a keyboard or with his nose stuck in a book, Cunegan can probably be found at a race track or watching a race on TV.

Book preview

FOREWARD

Let's get one thing straight: this is not a book on writing.

This book is as close as I'll likely ever get to writing one. Fact of the matter is, books on writing don't really do much for me. There are two exceptions—Stephen King's On Writing and Chuck Wendig's Damn Fine Story—but for the most part, the how to write genre of non-fiction is one I could do without. Typically, books on writing fall into one of two categories: either they bore me to tears or they intimidate me so much that I consider, however briefly, the possibility of...no longer writing.

To me, the problem with books on writing stems from the fact that writing is not a one-size-fits-all activity (or vocation or hobby or job...your mileage on this may vary). So many of these books treat whatever tenet of writing they're discussing as gospel, as if whatever wisdom they have to share is universal, something every writer should do. A lot of these books have an air about them that says, "Only the truly successful authors do this." But as most writers know, a piece of advice that works for one of us certainly does not work for all of us.

As is the case with many other artistic pursuits, writing is an individualistic endeavor. I don't just mean that in the sense that writers often write by themselves (excepting for co-writers), but also in the sense that each writer has a process that only works for them. A writer's process is as personal to them as the actual content of their work. My process is mine and mine alone, and chances are my process wouldn't work for someone else. The reverse is also true; you can tell me until you're blue in the face how you approach writing, but that's your process. Just because it works for you, that doesn't mean it will work for me.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, no matter what the how to genre of books might tell you.

Ultimately, there is no one right or wrong way to write a book (aside from, you know, actually sitting down and writing it). Outlining or flying by the seat of your pants; prologue or no prologue; narrative structure so rigid your manuscript is less a story and more one of those paint-by-numbers things from when we were kids...there are so many different paths to take on the journey of being a writer that writing a book telling people which parts of the journey to take amounts to little more than a fool's errand. Those presumptuous enough to tell others how it's done risk coming across as pedantic.

If not outright snobbish.

If one were to write a book on writing to appeal to every writer—either established or aspiring—it would be an incredibly short book, because all it would say is sit down and write. That's literally the only piece of writing advice that applies to every writer, regardless of skill level or experience or preferred method of getting words down on the page.

But I will posit there is one other thing writers should do if their goal is to improve as a writer. Not just in terms of the quality of their writing, but also in their productivity.

Every writer I know, no matter whether they've been published several times over or they're just starting out, struggles with productivity. Real life gets in the way, whether it's the stress and time-suck of a day job or family drama or exhaustion or, of late, a global pandemic that has us all worried about potential life-threatening illness and financial ruin. It can be hard to find the motivation to write at times, which is one of the reasons I'm so bullish on such programs as The Office of Letters and Light, the organization behind National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as we writers call it).

I'm no different; when I first published Bounty in the summer of 2015, it started a stretch in which I published five novels and a novella in a two-year span. But in the last four years, that productivity has dried up to the point where Betrayal, which I published this past April, was the first novel I'd published in more than three years. The reasons for this are numerous (and go beyond the reality of my own day-to-day life), but that relative dry spell also taught me something about myself as a creator:

My writing slumps coincide with my reading slumps. Put another way, the more I'm reading, the more I'm writing.

The reasons for this are multi-fold, and I explore them in this book. But the crux of the argument—the whole reason for The Art of Reading's existence—is this: every writer should also be a voracious reader (I don't care what the post in that Facebook writer group you're in says). Next to the act of actually writing, reading is the single most valuable, most important tool a writer has in their toolbox, and it's probably your most dependable one.

Time was, I wasn't a big reader. When I did read, I insisted on my books having pictures in them (as in comic books and graphic novels). It wasn't until early adulthood, once I had left formal schooling behind, that I truly discovered the joy of reading for my own pleasure. The more I read, the more books I put on my shelf or downloaded onto my Kindle, the more the creative spark within me grew. Soon, that spark ignited into a full-grown blaze, and at that point, I found myself at the keyboard, tapping away at any of the several projects I've published or several more that are in various stages of development.

So, rest assured that I will not use the following pages to tell you how to write. You already know how to do that (even if you sometimes feel like you don't—trust me, that's completely normal). But I will tell you how reading can help make your writing even better, and along the way, I'll give you a sense of how you can use reading not just as a vehicle for your own entertainment and amusement, but also as a tool to improve your own craft as a writer.

After all, stories were what