My reading habits started to change in my early twenties, coinciding with the time that I started to “get serious” about my writing. Before that, I wasn’t a picky reader. I had my likes and dislikes, but it was the rare novel that I’d put aside unfinished.
Then I started taking a more critical look at my own writing, and striving to improve by enrolling in classes, reading writing books and joining writing groups. It was great for my writing. Not so great for my reading. As I learned to have less patience with my own bad habits, I started having less patience for them with others.
I’m always careful about admitting that because it smacks of snobbery. Like someone who starts reading Vogue and begins snarking about other people’s poor fashion choices. Believe me, I don’t want to critique the writing of others. I want to sit back and enjoy their stories, the way I used to. But it’s so hard to turn that critical part of my brain off.
The problem is not that my own writing is so fabulous and flawless that I can’t abide lesser work. Ha! I wish. I’m well aware of my own writing faults. That’s the problem. I’m so vigilant for their symptoms that the moment I start reading a work of fiction, my internal editor switches on.
In my own writing, I’ve probably struggled with every flaw you could list—from those as big as flat characters and slow pacing to those as small as word repetition and adverb overuse. So when I’m reading a novel, I notice them. I can’t help it. Maybe that will help me become a better editor and writer, but it’s certainly doesn’t make me a happier reader!
I want to be swept away by the story, regardless of the writing. Sometimes I can be—the story is so fantastic that I can ignore the fact that the writer uses twenty adverbs per page. In general, though, I’ve become much more picky.
If the book is in serious need of a line editor or the characters just lie on the page or the story doesn’t suck me in, I put the book down. I know I’ve missed some good novels by giving up on them too soon.
As a reader, I want to learn to better train my internal editor to distinguish between my stories (business) and other people’s stories (entertainment). In the meantime, though, there is an upside. When I was younger, I often forced myself to finish a truly bad book because I felt I had to, especially if I’d paid for it. Today, if I put it aside, I can console myself with the knowledge that it wasn’t a complete waste of time or money—I learned something about writing from the experience. Now, if only I could figure out a way to write off those books as a business expense . . .
