"Reading"

Writers need to be good readers. "Reading" is one of those skills that no writer can choose to bypass. As I spend more and more time inside workshops being a student and a teacher of writing/literature, I am learning to identify students who are readers and those who are not. Lack of reading experiences do show up in one's writings in ways more than one. It is not something which I would be able to analyze in perfectly clear terms. Rather, it is one of those intuitive things which jumps at me from the page. But when I say "reading" is an essential skill for writers, I do not necessarily mean reading books and magazines and such. I also mean an ability to "read" the world around, to take apart what is familiar, to begin to see what is not apparent in the naked eye and to put it back together again in one's own text. I would also say this ability to "read" is also another way to think of a writer's sociological eye. That perceptiveness which allows a writer to see the workings of bigger social structures and historical forces within apparently insignificant everyday actions. A lot of it is, obviously, transmitted through details, but I would say, it's more than just details. It's about what one chooses to write about and why. It's about the essential philosophy behind one's aesthetic efforts. I must admit, my own time in the PhD program has been extremely fruitful in that way. I have read things which I would not have read otherwise. I have developed new interests, I have nurtured the old ones. I don't know if my PhD will contribute to anything, but it has definitely made me a better "reader" of things--literary and non-literary.