This year I’m chairing the judging panel for the HWA Gold Crown once again. Which basically means wrangling a massive spreadsheet and making sure all the books get read. As well as actually reading them myself! With over one hundred books submitted, piling up in my hallway as a silent reminder each time I walk past them, it takes discipline to get them all read.
I love reading. I usually read a couple of books a week in normal times, so this should be easy, right? Although, like anything, as soon as you ‘have to’ do something, it takes on a less fun veneer. Even a voracious reader like me has had to up her reading time per day to get through the growing pile, with books from some publishers still arriving. Luckily, a new day job has given me an extra hour of reading time on the bus, a place where I find that I can read quite easily. But I still have to be disciplined and plan my reading time to make sure I can manage all the books. And there are some lovely surprises in there. Alongside the big name authors, so many novels that I hadn’t come across before and have been an utter delight to get lost in.
Often as a writing tutor and freelance editor I’ve told new writers that they need to read more. I’ve given them recommendations of both novels and non-fiction that might help them with writing skills or to see how other writers in their genre tackle it. A lot of times those people report back that they’ve found that useful, but others seem to shy away from the prescriptive. Perhaps by making it too much like ‘homework’, it takes the joy out of the reading for them - I don’t know. Maybe it’s due to my background of working in sales, but I also find that giving myself a reward helps to spur me on too. So I have a selection of none HWA novels ready to be picked up once our judging is done in September!
There is an element of writing feeling like action and reading feeling more inactive, but I don’t know if that’s actually the case. Reading can feel passive, just absorbing the ideas of someone else, but is that what’s really happening? You only have to discuss a book with a friend or go to a book club meeting to find out that how people react to the same book can be wildly different. We read through the prism of our own experiences and preferences but also, as a writer, I’m often reading with that hat on. Looking at the skills on show, at how the book has been put together and considering whether I would have had the same approach. I know I’ve loved a book when I haven’t tried to mentally edit it halfway through!
But I think that for some writers, especially at the beginning, it can feel as though you’re putting off the writing and that you’d be better off using the little spare time you may have, sitting at the laptop or with pen in hand. It’s my opinion that there’s a happy medium, if you can just find it.