I don't read books and I know that's controversial

"When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs."  

Garrison Keillor

If you ask a writer for advice on writing, most likely they will tell you to read. And as someone who has always learned better by doing, I’ve never quite understood that. If you want to be a better writer, isn’t the first thing you should do is write?

There’s the age-old adage that practice makes perfect.

A few weeks back someone I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time got in touch with me to ask me how he should go about starting a literary project he had been thinking about for some time. I was surprised and humbled. Specifically, he was unsure of what perspective to use to tell his story. Since it was non-fiction, I suggested first person, though was not opposed to his idea of third and cited instances where non-fiction had been written as fiction. Although it is in first person, I referenced Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a novel that is a fictionalized account of real-life happenings as documented in Thompson’s many letters. Before I could finish my thought, though, he interrupted me and said he had never read a book before in his life. I didn’t doubt it, knowing his background. I told him his first step was that he needed to read a book. He said that wouldn’t happen. I told him I couldn’t believe I said that.

I don’t read books. I own many. But a lot of them have never been opened or have only had the first 50 or so pages read. When I was younger I read a lot—including almost every book K.A. Applegate wrote (the best one was the Everworld with the human sacrifice). I honestly couldn’t tell you the last book I read in full that wasn’t a poetry chapbook or a requirement for a college class, but if I had to guess it was either The Kite Runner or Nick Hornby’s young adult novel, Slam. As a writer, I have been criticized by more than one person more than one time for this. And while I get that reading is, in a sense, studying your craft, I have never quite understood why some writers seem to think that reading is more important than writing, even going so far as questioning your skill as a writer, with or without having read your work, simply because you aren’t constantly reading or if are reading, aren’t talking about what you are reading. And that boggles me.

The best thing a writer can to do to become a better writer is write.

My freshman year of college I went to a Garrison Keillor book signing. At the time, I hadn’t read any of his books, but I had fallen in love with the film A Prairie Home Companion and started listening to the radio show when I could. I didn’t know if he would speak at the event or just sign books (I bought one when I got there—Lake Wobegon 1956), but I knew that if he did speak, he would undoubtedly have something good to say.

I can’t remember the main premise of the speech that he did give. I can only remember three things. He had the entire group situated on the second floor of Books and Co. in Beavercreek, OH sing “Amazing Grace”, the lyrics rolling off the high ceilings of bookstore. As I stood in line waiting my turn for an autograph (on both my newly acquired book and the DVD jacket for my copy of A Prairie Home Companion), my phone rang and it was this 1920s-swing-big band type of ring tone. I was embarrassed and quickly tried to ignore the call from my dad. As I approach Mr. Keillor, he asked me what that sound was and I thought for sure he was going to yell at me for not having my phone turned off. Instead, he said he liked my ringtone.

The thing that really stuck out to me, though, was his response to a young man, maybe 16 or 17, during a brief Q&A session. It was a question standard to these kinds of things, one I am sure you have heard or read many times in interviews: “What advice do you have for a young writer?” Mr. Keillor’s response was simple. Write about the people around you. He said that all of the inspiration you needed was around you—something Garrison Keillor clearly believes if you have ever read any of his books. I can still remember this line word-for-word: “For without you, their lives will go unrecorded.”

Life is full of characters and dialogue and plotlines. Every story you will ever tell, whether it’s fiction, poetry, non-fiction, has already been lived out for you. You just have to write it down.

The key to writing a good story isn’t reading a book—it’s writing a good story. Write something that feels real and people will believe it is real. You will never find that with your nose buried in a book, but rather by living life. We communicate every day in one form or another: text messages, phone calls, small talk with strangers, Facebook posts, Tweets, dinner table conversation with the family, philosophical talks around a summer bonfire. Writing is communication. It is taking an event—real or fake—and putting it down on paper in a way that will elicit emotions in the reader and enable them to develop a relationship with not just the characters but the story as a whole. 

People want to read things which they can believe to be real, which they can identify with.

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school I attended a week-long creative writing camp hosted by a nearby university. The instructor echoed Mr. Keillor’s thoughts, stating that the best dialogue is real dialogue. His suggestion was to go to the mall or a coffee shop or somewhere else public with a notebook and write down the conversations you hear. Get the slang, the colloquialisms, the dialect. This is where almost every ounce of inspiration you will ever need for your creativity lies.

I buy heavily into Mr. Keillor’s advice, as well as that of the instructor at the creative writing camp. And I firmly believe that the best advice for a writer is to write. I’m not saying don’t read. Reading is important. But I don’t think reading makes you a good writer. Writing makes you a good writer. I don’t think it is okay for anyone to ever discredit or judge someone as a writer simply because they’re not reading three books at a time.

As for the friend, whether he reads a book or not, I have no doubt in my mind that he has the talent to create something that millions of people will read and they will find inspiration in it. I think he has a better chance than I do. I just hope he does it.

How my driver's license got a little heart

Back in May I turned 25, which in Ohio meant I had to renew my driver’s license. I actually almost forgot, but remembered the afternoon before my birthday and hurried to the BMV where I got a new picture that gets double-takes because I was randomly wearing my contacts and dropped a bunch of money I wasn’t planning on spending—fresh into unemployment. It was the usual schpeel, though thankfully without a line; I was actually in an out within twenty minutes, perhaps a new record. There were all the normal questions: do you have insurance, are you a citizen, height, weight, etc etc.

“Would you like to be an organ donor?” she asked across the counter, showing such little emotion.

I replied to her with no hesitation, “Yes.”

Prior to that, I had not been an organ donor. There was not a little heart on my driver’s license, just a letter than meant I had to wear corrective lenses while driving. I hadn’t even considered it, despite having heard testimonies in school and in driver’s ed. It’s strange how they show you videos of dismembered bodies to promote safe driving, but then encourage you donate your organs in case their instruction doesn’t work. I even met a double lung transplant once by chance; she works at the bookstore I occasionally visit.

For some reason I felt that my body should remain whole upon death—a selfish thought carried over from my youth. I had no explanation for that reasoning other than that.

A while back I met a young man who knew he would eventually be placed on the transplant list for a double lung transplant after a lifetime of lung infections related to cystic fibrosis had ravaged the set he was born with.

His lungs weren’t destroyed by something he did—not by smoking or exposure to chemicals in the workplace. This happened because of a rare genetic mutation. Rare as in only 30,000 people in the United States have the disease—that’s significantly less than how many people die each month from heart disease and just about equal to how many die each year because of car accidents. Diabetes affects almost 1000 times as many people in the United States. Over five million people in the United States are believed to be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Cystic fibrosis affects just 30,000 people nationwide, 70,000 people worldwide. Columbus, Ohio—the nearest major metropolitan area to where I live—is home to around 800,000 people. Even if we looked at the Columbus suburb of Delaware where I went to college, there is a population of about 35,000.

I think that should give you some perspective. Because I just looked up those numbers to write this and even though I already knew some of those statistics, it still did for me.

My cousin will eventually need a double lung transplant too, as will the young boy who lives up the street from me. They too suffer from cystic fibrosis.

It is surreal to me that right now a friend of mine is in need of new organs. And even though I have known this disease since my cousin was diagnosed just a handful of months before her second birthday—a late diagnosis, actually—almost nine years ago, it has only been within the last few months that it has become real to me. Before meeting that young man, who has since become a very good friend, earlier this year, the idea of a double lung transplant hadn’t even crossed my mind. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t know it would happen eventually. Now I can’t help but recall all of those dramatic episodes of ER and Scrubs. Do you remember “My Lunch”? Or the movie John Q?

Generally the word ‘surreal’ is used to describe good things: things reminiscent of fairy tales or our favorite dreams. But I can’t find a better word to describe how am I feeling. It’s bizarre knowing that someone else must first die in order for someone else to live.

How do you pray for that?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I don’t think I ever will and to be honest, I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure that is something I want to think about. But whoever it is who ends up giving this gift, I want to thank them while I still can.

But I liked foxes before that band from Norway

The first time I can remember seeing a fox was when I was spending a summer in London staying with a friend. He lived in a small suburb in the southeastern part of the city. There were three of us—my friend, another friend of ours, and myself—staying in the guest room on the second floor of his house, overlooking the street. We were awoken sometime around 1am or so by a rustling outside. It was my other friend who heard it first and he acted as excited as a small child on Christmas morning. There were three foxes outside running through the streets and going through the neighborhood’s trash and recycling. I was very confused when my friends told me to look at the foxes outside. I couldn’t figure out why there would be foxes in the middle of a city. I thought foxes lived in forests or in the arctic—not cities. But in England, foxes live wherever they please.

The foxes in London aren’t the red foxes you generally think of—they’re a little smaller and grey. They’re England’s equivalent to the raccoons of Ohio, scavenging through the most easily-accessible of trashcans for whatever left-behind scraps for dinner. And like with raccoons and some birds of prey, they roam the city because it was their home long before the likes of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Although London is one of the oldest cities in the world, the modern city we know used to be much smaller with a lot more forests—though even now it is one of the greenest cities in the world. As civilization expanded, the foxes stayed put, adapting to their new urban environment, not giving up or into mankind’s supreme domination. Instead, creating a new way of life.

Foxes are an inspiration.

I remember when I lived in London for three months in 2008, I was out walking one day in, I think, a business district near Euston Station and in the middle of the sidewalk right at the very edge of a walkway to an office building was a fox. A dead fox. It was bloated and probably had a few flies around, though I don’t recall it smelling. Clearly, it had been there for a while. I remember stopping and staring at it briefly before continuing on my walk, wondering why it was still there. Although it wasn’t squished or even at all bloody, I assumed it had been hit by a car and the 20’ from the road to its final resting place was all the further the fox could make it. I couldn’t figure out why it was still there though—why no one either from the city or from the building, the walkway of which was being intruded upon by the fox, had removed it yet. It was as if I was the only one who could see it. Maybe that’s how the fox wanted to go out.

A few weeks ago I saw a fox dead in the middle of the road. For the longest time I never even knew that foxes were native to Ohio until a couple years ago when I had one run out in front of me one evening as my friend and I were driving to a restaurant in a nearby city for dinner. That fox managed to not get hit by either my car or the one coming from the opposite direction. This fox I saw a couple weeks ago, however, was not as lucky.

I really like foxes. I think they’re beautiful creatures—majestic even. They hold great significance to me. When the fox ran into the road and dodged both oncoming cars, that, to me, was a sign that even though absolutely nothing in my world seemed to be right, it would all be okay eventually. So when I saw the dead fox in the middle of the fox a few backs, I wondered if that too were a sign. And if it was, what did it mean? With unemployment and the job hunt still looming, I didn’t like the implications of that sign. However, my mind was put at ease not long after.

As I drove home from my favorite pizza local pizza place, Firehouse Pizza, the other night right at dusk, I noticed two animals playing in someone’s driveway. I saw pointy ears and tails, so I assumed they were cats. But as I drove by, they stopped playing and looked at me—they were foxes. Younger foxes, I assumed, who were enjoying each other’s company by wrestling around as the sun started to fade away. And I smiled, happy to see these creatures enjoying themselves.