The Joy of Reading: How It Can Inspire Your Writing Journey

I recently reread Anna Quindlen’s How Reading Changed My Life. I devoured this book some twenty years ago, and felt like Quindlen was a kindred reader. I, too, feel that reading has been a great gift, a comfort to me, a way to understand and connect with the world around me and even worlds far away.

As a girl in the late 1960’s, I recall spending many quiet hours in the cool dimness of the traveling Bookmobile in Racine during summer vacation, sitting on the floor, smelling the books, and trying to make the hard decision of what books to choose but still stay under the checkout limit. I also recall my sister and I squealing with excitement when my dad came home from work with his hands behind his back and told us to “pick a hand.” We didn’t fight over which hand to pick because we knew each of his hands held a brand new Nancy Drew book! We each read our chosen book, then exchanged our choices and reread them many times. I was impressed by Nancy's independence and her ability to solve problems her own way. I still have about fifteen of those original volumes on my bookshelves. I also consumed everything Walter Farley wrote, as I was enthralled with horses as a girl--I still am. My favorite was The Black Stallion. I imagined myself galloping on his magnificent back across fields of green grass and leaping over fences, my hair streaming behind me in the wind. I was drawn to that image of freedom and power. Other books helped me to travel outside the confines of my bedroom: The Phantom Tollbooth, The Little Prince, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Gone With the Wind. As a girl, it didn't occur to me that these authors were writing about what mattered to them and what they thought might matter to their readers. I was just delighted, entertained, and inspired.

Quindlen said, “For many of us, reading begets more reading and more reading begets writing.” That has not been the case for me. I hold more to Alberto Manguel’s assertion in his A History of Reading, “I could live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading.”

I am a forever reader, but I never thought I would be a writer. Reading feels easy, writing feels hard. Sure, as an English major in college I could write a good paper—even apparently a “great” one per my English Professor’s comment on my senior thesis regarding "Sexual References in the Works of Thomas Hardy" (those Victorians were not so straight-laced)---but I didn’t aspire to anything beyond that other than dedicated journaling (I didn't view that as real writing) which I did prolifically throughout college. In my master’s program I wrote the required papers toward my goal of becoming a psychotherapist, and I even enjoyed writing my psychotherapy notes after my sessions with clients back in the late 1980’s-1990's when handwritten medical records notes were the norm.

As I continued my love affair with reading as I aged, I sometimes wondered what motivates someone to write a whole book? How does one actually do such a hard thing? To explore that huge undertaking I read Julia Cameron’s books The Artist’s Way and her follow up Walking in This World and tried her method of "morning pages" to challenge myself with a writing goal. It didn’t work—to be more precise, I didn’t do the work. I was okay with that.

Then, something so monumental happened in my life that I had to write it down. I didn’t want to--I resisted it--but I couldn’t escape it.  My dear son Ethan died of an accidental heroin overdose at age 25 in 2016, a victim of the opioid epidemic after an eight year battle with mental health and addiction issues. After his death, I returned to my college habit of journaling, copiously filling many notebooks, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.  Then, on a frigid morning in January of 2019, I woke up and---to my astonishment--- six hours later I had mapped out a detailed outline of my journey of healing after my son’s death. I taped yellow legal pad pages together as my “map” expanded. It looked like the gameboard of Candyland with multiple squares on a twisting path, each one representing another step of my learning how to have a relationship with my son as a spirit. I published my memoir Spirit Son in 2020.

So, that was the reason I wrote a book. Experiencing something so life changing that I not only had to write it down but I wanted to share it with others. All the years of reading what others wrote and feeling moved, uplifted, nourished and also challenged by what they wrote were seeds in me that bore fruit when something happened in my life that I wanted to share.

Since publishing Spirit Son, I have been writing a monthly blog for the past four years and enjoy sharing that, too. As a human family we have an innate desire to share with each other our insights, our dreams, our expertise. I think my writing is a way of connecting with and helping my larger human family. Our joy is multiplied when we share it, and we heal when we share our hardships.

Words are marvelous tools through which we name what we may not even know until we write it down. Endeavoring to put into words how we succeed, how we persevere through struggle, and what makes our life meaningful can reward us and others with understanding and growth. When we take the risk to put our written words out there for others to read we soon discover that we are more alike than different. We are all connected. We are not alone.

Is there a discovery, a delight, a dream, an experience that has changed you? Try putting it into words. Write it down. Maybe even share it. It may delight, inspire, or help a reader who reads your words.