Chris Jones has never read Gary Smith -- and why

Sirs, Madames,

What you read is irrelevant. What you write is the only thing that's relevant. How you get there is your business. Product vs process. Does Jones read Smith or vice versa? Could care less, no offence to either.

YHS, etc

 

I've always wondered about the knee-jerk "Read as much as you can" response whenever the subject of writing comes up. Wouldn't writing as much as you can be more helpful?

 

Reading and writing go hand in hand. don't turn it into either read or write. to stay on topic, chris acknowledges he reads a ton. just, until now, consciously avoided the work of gary. but the iceberg appears to be thawing...

 

No one said either/or. But the "read" response is so ingrained, I'm not sure people really believe that. It just sounds good.

 

The problem with simply writing as much as you can is if you have some bad habits, they can just get progressively worse and harder to change if you don't correct them. It's kind of the cliche that practice makes perfect as long as it's perfect practice.

I was always told to read as much literature as just reading other writers and I always tried to do that.

I don't think I ever consciously tried to write like another writer. That just seems absurd to me.

 

I think one should always try to learn from others, incorporate things others are strong at that would be helpful to you into your game. I've never really seen narrowing exposure as a good thing.

 

Good point, Mizzou.

 

The average American teenager probably writes a bit more than teenagers as recently as 10 years ago -- with texting, blogs, social media, message boards, MMO gaming chat, comments on the local hack's prep roundup, ect. I don't think you can say they write any better than their predecessors.

I think the response you're seeing is a reaction to SportsCenter lingo and "literally" creeping into blogs and copy. There's a lot of writing out there by people who obviously haven't read much. The inverse, people who read too much but don't write enough, is naturally harder to find, and in today's look-at-me culture, I'd suspect the "writing without adequately reading" crowd is much larger.

 

Your first question is impossible to answer, YF. I feel like I've done all right for myself. Would I have done better or worse had I read Smith at an earlier age? No idea. It's kind of like wondering what my kids would look like if I'd stayed with this girl or that girl instead of the girl who became my wife.

But to answer your second question, I would say yes, that the way he was presented to me was part of the problem. (My problem, I should point out. None of this should be taken as my being disrespectful of Smith. Totally the opposite.) That editor was fucking breathless. I mean, how good does a story have to be to make someone have a physical response like that? That, and the idea that I had to be someone else in order to be successful didn't sit well with me. I didn't like being told that I had to be like him. So, that's how it started.

And if I'm being honest, it eventually became a superstition more than anything else. I have a lot of rituals, and not reading Smith became one of them.

I'm not proud of it. I'm not ashamed of it. It's just a fact.

An idea that's floated on this thread that I find interesting—that writers are somehow above being influenced by other writers. That's insane to me. The way some don't seem to get how I might worry about being influenced by a voice as strong as Smith's, I don't get at all the idea that I never would be.

That applies to all sorts of art. Do you think Cage the Elephant never heard the Pixies? Jesus, the whole world is a series of our influences on each other.

 

And I'm thinking Boom represents the "reading without writing" side of that particular debate.

 

The only time I consciously did not read a writer was during my work on the Ali-Cosell book. I did not read Remnick on Ali, "King of the World." I knew it would be good, maybe even great, and I'd already set my ambition for the book far above my proven ability. I didn't need to raise it another inch, and I was afraid Remnick being great would cause me to overwrite more than I already do.

On the other read/write topic, you can talk all you want, memorize every page of Strunk & White, sleep with every how-to book ever published, but the best way to get really good is to read stuff better than yours -- read UP! -- and write until the voice is yours and yours alone.

 

Thanks for noticing Jones. Despite my eclectic reading tendencies, I've been able to retain my unique writing voice.