Synergy

The Reading and Writing Connection

The Writing Merry-Go-Round

It can be difficult (or impossible) to submit work to journals when you don’t have anything ready (or really ready) to submit. Such is the fact of the writing merry-go-round. That is, it’s a continuous activity: writing, revising, submitting, revising, submitting, etc. Even if you have a whole slew of stories that you’re sending out, the stories will, at some point, either get published or…well, they won’t. Either way, you keep moving, keep working at it. Round and round (so to speak).

But sometimes when stories can’t find a literary home, they might need substantial revision. And that’s when you might find that you only have stories that need work. And nothing to submit.

(I also occasionally find that I’ve “outgrown” a story or grown bored of it. Remember: It’s okay to let stories go!)

Very Aimless, Very Stalled

I’ve written in past posts about how I’ve felt stalled in my writing lately. It’s not that I haven’t been writing, but I have a lot of in-process pieces that aren’t quite ready for submitting. Almost all of them need the aforementioned work, i.e., revision. And sometimes I just don’t have the motivation…or inspiration…to work on them. It can happen for a variety of reasons, but once you step off that merry-go-round, it’s easy to feel stalled—as though you’re walking aimlessly around an amusement park, not sure where to go next.

As a writer, feeling stalled like this can be disheartening.

“Here’s the Problem”

My dad, a retired engineer, has always been a masterful diagnostician. All my life, I’ve heard various versions of “Here’s what you need to do” or “Here’s the problem.”

Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by cause and effect and love seeing how things connect.

One of the most obvious—yet sometimes neglected—partnerships in writing is the reading-writing connection. When used in tandem, reading and writing can create a synergy that really fuels one’s passion (and aptitude) for the craft.

Yet the other day I signed into Goodreads and noticed something: I haven’t been reading. In the months that I’ve felt stalled as a writer, my reading has also been stalled. Cause and effect, anyone?

It’s not exactly that I haven’t been reading; I read every day as part of my job. And I read newly published (and/or newly recommended-to-me) individual short pieces (often flash) that are published in online journals. I actually read a lot.

But I haven’t been reading books. Good old-fashioned books.

From February to June, I had no books recorded on my Goodreads. Yet I’m always ordering/getting my hands on enticing books. And I’m always so excited to read them! Yet somehow, I get waylaid. Anxiety and stress are big factors for me, as they tend to cause a lack of focus, and from there, it’s a whole downward spiral. But some of it is also habit. And when life gets in the way, it can be easy to get out of the reading and writing habit and/or pick up less healthy habits.

Making Reading and Writing a Habit

Creativity Begets Creativity

The real synergy of reading and writing is the way one informs the other. A few years ago, I blogged about reading (and writing) outside of one’s comfort zone; among other things, reading (and writing) outside of your comfort zone allows you to form fresh ideas and can help you be more innovative and creative as a writer. To hone your creativity, you typically need to be regularly exposed to creativity (and this can take many different forms!). Creativity begets more creativity.

In a similar vein, one cannot be a writer without being a reader, too—without regularly exposing themselves to the written word in some form. I typically hesitate to use absolutes, but this is something I firmly believe. Just as we can develop and hone our creativity through various endeavors, as writers, we develop and hone our writerly voice through practice and study. That study, by necessity, includes (surprise, surprise) reading.*

*Reading from online journals certainly counts as appropriate study, which is to say that you don’t have to read books to study craft. For me, though, the synergistic spark of creativity is much stronger when I’m reading from a hard copy—from a physical book.

Fight or Flight, Freeze or Fawn

But when life gets too hectic and/or you find it too hard to focus and just can’t read, for whatever reason, what do you do? This is my eternal struggle. I keep thinking of everything I have to do. My mind wanders. I’m one of those people who, if you give me a whole bunch of things to do, nothing will get done. When I become too overwhelmed/too overstimulated, I freeze.

And I also get so excited when I get a new book that I want to start reading it right away, without having finished the previous book(s) in my TBR pile. I am not a person who can comfortably read more than one book at a time, yet I try…

However, one thing I know about myself is that when I become too distracted and overwhelmed with endless things to do, the only way I can function is to set small goals for myself and create a list of priorities.

Little Steps

It is actually somewhat surprising how quickly you can “train” (or “un-train”) yourself to do something. As noted, it’s easy to get out of the habit of writing and submitting; it’s easy to get out of the habit of reading.

But getting back into the habit doesn’t have to be excruciating.

When you want to change a habit in your life, you don’t have to make a big change all at once. You can take little steps. What this looks like for me is reading from one of my unfinished books at some point during the day, often in the evening or right before bed. I don’t give myself a set number of pages to read. Since I often read flash fiction, most stories can be read quite quickly. Reading for five or ten minutes is practically nothing at all, time-wise, but it’s something, enough to reignite the habit.

Writing, in fact, is much the same. Instead of thinking of all the writing projects I want to be working on—and there are a lot!—I need to pick one or two to focus on at a time. Probably most people know to break something larger down into more manageable chunks. But it can be easy to forget.

Most importantly, though, is understanding that these two activities—reading and writing—work synergistically! It’s common for me to read a flash piece, get excited, and want to write; there’s a flow, a cadence, to the process, followed by (re)emergence of motivation and energy. Reading makes me want to write, and writing makes me want to read. Synergy. It’s a beautiful thing!

I recently had a fun ‘70s-themed photo shoot with Trumbull Photography, LLC, and tried tossing my beret in the air a la Mary Tyler Moore, perhaps as a subconscious reminder to keep going: “You’re gonna make it after all”!

What Am I Reading?

As I previously mentioned, I don’t do well with reading more than one book at a time, yet here I am; this is precisely why I had no books recorded for several months on Goodreads—because I have too many started and my focus is all over the place!

Here are some of my current in-progress books (in no particular order):

• Best Microfiction 2024 by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke (series editors) and Grant Faulkner (guest editor). My favorite series, I always look forward to the yearly installment of this book. This is the perfect book for initiating a reading habit, as the stories are short (and so, so good) and can be read in just small pockets of time.

• There Is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller. I picked this book up at AWP in February and have been mesmerized by the language and lyricism. It’s weird and lovely. I’m almost done with it!

• Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir by Allison Blevins. Another book that I picked up at AWP, this is a thought-provoking book of very short lyrical prose. I’m almost done with this one, too!

• The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2023 by Debbie Lamedman (editor). As I attempt to write my first ten-minute play, I keep picking this up for inspiration and reading a play here and a play there.

• Americana: Stories by Bill Hemmig. This is a wonderful collection of often-

  innovative literary fiction by a friend of mine. I started reading it when it came out a year ago, but then got distracted by other books. I have just four more stories left to read!

What are you reading? Comment below!