writing reading writing

I just re-read some things I slapped onto this blog in December. Horrible.
Subject matter okay, but writing was marginal at best.
I forced myself to write something, anything. That was what fell out of my head. Badly. Like the unmistakable yet cringe-inducing sound of a high-performance vehicle throwing a rod. Okay, I'm not a high performance vehicle. It's an analogy for crying out loud.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. By lately, I mean the last 14 months. Well, actually, the reading was only for about 8 months. I probably did neither serious reading nor writing for a good six month stretch. I digress.
I realized that the more I read, the more my critical brain kicked into a gear that I didn't even recognize. I found myself wanting to fix the novels I'd been shoveling into my brain: plot holes, weak characters, horrific sentence structures, meandering pointless prose. But, of course there were merits as well. I'd savored some amazing descriptive painting-by-prose, admired heroic characters, loathed unforgettable villains and raced to devour labyrinthine, but engaging plots.

Previously, I'd been doing a lot of writing but no reading (unless you count 39 Clues books that I read with my son). During that time, my writing got more and more monotonous. I wasn't enjoying the ride. I wanted to beat up my characters. I don't mean that figuratively. I mean literally. Like take em out back and just brain em with a cinder block.
Figuratively, I guess I did exactly that. I stopped writing.
I needed to drown in the words and worlds of others.
It isn't that I lost the story. I can find a story in anything and everything. Story is the fiber of my soul: the touching, the absurd, the cataclysmic, even the mundane. It's all a story if you see it from the right angle. But to put those stories into words and sentences and paragraphs and descriptive prose, I had forgotten how delicious it can be. To consume the work of others reminded me of that and made me want to try my hand at mastering the recipe.

I think now it is time to begin again, begin anew. When I've been in a writing rut, I default to stories and characters and worlds I've previously created to kickstart me again. But, I think at this point, my old characters are not going to be brought back into play. Molly, Lilli, Miss Parkinson, Desmond.....love all of them. But it's time to start over.

And even as I contemplate the next character that I shall pluck from the purgatory of my brain's waiting-room, I will continue to read. After all, there's a mammoth pile of books at my bedside beckoning me.