How Reading 19th/20th Century Writers Gave My Writing New Life in 2021
I know, I know, I’m beating a path well-worn by restating that reading is essential to writing. Deliberate, studious reading, that is. I doubt there’s anything exceedingly original I might add on this subject. But the point — that to write, to write better and better, a writer must read, read, and reread — is so crucial and true that it bears repeating. Ad nauseam, in slightly varied words, in my particular voice and style, using examples from my own recent reading. Call it serendipity that I write this at the same time as tallying and weighing the books I’ve read in 2021 and mining the copious end-of-year lists currently circulating the ether. This is the imprint of what I’ve been reading on my writing.
There’s evidence abound on the vast benefits of reading and developing the reading brain. Increased vocabulary, improved memory, enhanced empathy, you name it. Dedicated, meticulous reading can not only prevent cognitive decline with age, but prolong life itself. An expertly crafted text can be a primer for the mechanics of writing, modeling diction, verb tense, sentence structure, transitions, punctuation, and the like. Though it’s not how an author uses, say, commas that enraptures the reader. It’s what they present and represent between them that makes the indelible mark, animating readers to think, then to write. (Incidentally, when unable to progress with/in this piece, I’ve been sneaking into Giovanni’s Room to commune with and learn from the great James Baldwin.)
I firmly believe in reading everything. (So I was taught from childhood, when irrevocably infected by the voracious reading bug.) Street signs, placards, advertisements, catalogs. Notes, letters, contracts, bills, down to the fine print. Newspapers, magazines, dictionaries. Blogs, website content, social media blurbs, hell, even push notifications and hashtags. Only it is the longer, complex works that challenge your mind’s eye, jostle you out of your comfort zone, steep you in the riches of their written elements; it is these that contain the life-altering and life-lengthening magic of reading.
This year, I've been reading some of the 19th and 20th century greats, all undeniably great though several are excluded from the loaded literary canon. (I will devote a separate piece to the canonical debate.) I met a kindred writing spirit when reading Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood. Simultaneously literal and ironic, she cuts sharply to the point, whether as narrator or in the voice of a character. Her delivery is terse to a fault; yet it capably encompasses the gendered worlds within and around her protagonist, the worlds of her Igbo village and the multiethnic city of Lagos under British colonialism, and the transitional worlds of both locales and their societies during Nigerian nation-formation.
Neither does Zora Neale Hurston mince words in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her language exudes the cycles of nature, the movements of light, wind, and water, and the connections between creatures of all kinds and their physical environment. Without preaching or lecturing, the deceptively light-hearted banter between characters layers mythology and history onto the intricate workings of the society Hurston depicts. On this third rereading of the novel, I fell in love (for the first time) with its vivid storytelling rather than the plot. Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that “the medium is the message” offers the ideal explanation: “For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content.’” Hurston’s earnest words, infused with florid beauty and palpable meaning, are the all-important medium. Never mind the plot.
I’ll say the same of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which I reveled in for the first time this year. His brevity is laden with imagery and significance, like staccato in writing — what’s left off the page frames and emphasizes what remains on it. These three authors all paint with the written word. Emecheta slathers thick gobs of oils matter-of-factly, mixing them for nuance, but never diluting the words or the reactions they elicit. Hurston writes with watercolors, feathery and transparent, and casts a spell with each brush stroke, each turn of phrase. Fitzgerald deftly smears acrylics in vibrant, viscous tones, calling forth stunning moving pictures. None of the three lets their colors run or run amok. Each is firmly in control of their word whirl, leaving the reader transfixed. And prompted to emulate them in writing.
The 19th century Russians I read this year are also thorough teachers: Dostoevsky, dripping philosophy, literature, and theology from each word and expression in Notes from the Underground; Tolstoy, who compels the reader to suffer and rejoice with the characters of Anna Karenina by peering directly into their souls until mesmerized by the turmoil; and Pushkin, for the imperceptible yet fundamental narrator setting enthralling scenes in so few poetic lines, calculating rhyme and reason gorgeously and efficiently at once.
Despite their many differences, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs and Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man both work the “personal is political” approach, taking a stance on tragic, charged social and moral issues. Jacobs’ narrative is heart-wrenching and urgent, written from raw experience. She makes her anti-slavery argument explicit from the text’s very start, reasserting and elaborating it vehemently throughout. Hugo’s fictional account, on the other hand, stakes an inferred claim against the death penalty by imprisoning the reader alongside the protagonist while he expounds bureaucratic, legal processes and counts down the maddening inevitability of execution. Either way, these authors effect their messages and inspire their reader to write their convictions.
It’s an egregious error to consider reading passive; at its best, it is a full body and brain experience. First, reading is a catalyst for thinking and feeling. All of the senses are involved and imagination besides. Following the running script with the eyes conjures images, beings, and landscapes beyond them, like a flickering film reel. These fireworks of neuron activity bring entire worlds into being and transform the reader. The visions and the word whirl generated primes the next creative act: writing.
About Lydia Shestopalova
Lydia is a free thinker, a rabid reader, and a writer manifesting a word lover's dream. She is a multilingual, queer, migrant Cold War child and an eclectic historian. She used to make community college students call her "Professor" because only her third-graders could get away with "Miss Lydia". You can read her at: seeknsea.wordpress.com