The Exquisite Tension of Reading

It's a lesson on the craft of writing

I’ve been thinking about reading lately. Also, tension and writing (which is never far from my mind, anyway), and ultimately how the three unite.

But first, reading, which is at the heart of it all.

Photo by Matias North on Unsplash

Ponder with me how it feels to be absorbed in an excellent book. You have to put it down to go about the dailiness of life and even your work. But you don’t want to stop. That’s the first point of tension in reading: you need to stop but you don’t want to.

And then think about how you’re turning pages so, so quickly because you desperately want to know what happens. And yet—you also don’t want the book to end. You want to stay absorbed in that fictional world. You don’t want to awaken from the fictive dream. That’s the second point of tension: you need to find out what happens but you don’t want the book to end.

You’re walking in another person’s shoes, living their life. “There’s no more powerful art form to let us into somebody’s head than fiction,” book coach Jenni Nash says. And for awhile, just a little while, you’re getting a break from your own life, you’re forgetting your own worries. Because you are in somebody else’s head, living somebody else’s life.

So now, writing. There are tensions involved in writing, oh are there tensions! There’s the tension of having a story locked inside you but you don’t know how to let it out. The tension of wanting to sit down to write but not having enough time. There’s the tension of getting stuck, not knowing what to write next. For many writers, the thought, I should be writing, is never far from their mind, from the moment they wake until they go to bed, day in, day out. That’s an inherent tension. And it’s not always a negative tension. It can be positive—because there’s nothing sweeter than releasing that tension when you finally sit down to write.

These two tensions can come together to create engrossing stories. Use the constant tension you feel as a writer who should be writing to fuel conflict in your novel. “Put the drama on the page,” Julia Cameron says. That drama may come from events in your life or your own mental processes around writing. Either way, it doesn’t matter—it all counts as tension.

And we writers are masters at dealing with it. Because, of course, the best writers are those who read a lot. My friend Roy has this quote as his email signature: “Reading, for the writer, is a practical matter. How do you know what can be done unless you’ve seen it done by others?” (Not sure of the attribution.)

You know those stories you read once in awhile in which a person who had never written before sat down and wrote a novel and then it got published? I’m positive those writers had inhaled books like they were cocaine for many years, starting as a young child. Because reading imprints things into your brain. Things like style and structure and character arc and dialogue. The person who reads a lot intuitively understands a lot about writing.

And also conflict. Which is the heart of it all—reading and writing.