There are few things as necessary as reading in the life of a writer. Reading shapes the way we see the world; it also informs how we write, inspires us to create stories, and motivates us when we hit a roadblock or want to throw in the towel. However, this apparently simple activity can also be a challenge; it can get disrupted, and easing back into it might not be as simple as one thinks. Join us as we talk about how you can tackle a reading roadblock or hit the reset button when your reading gets off track.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 050: The Role of Reading in Writing

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 49 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.

Crystal Hunt: Reading is an important part of being a writer. So today we’re going to discuss how reading influences our writing, what happens when that gets disrupted and how you can tackle easing back in or hitting the reset button when you’ve gotten off track. But as always, we’re going to give you a little update of what we have been up to.

Michele, what have you been doing in your writerly world this past week? 

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: I have a deadline to meet. So I’ve been writing like crazy and I’m pointing to at least 40 hours this month, so I need to get the ball going. Other than that, I’m very excited that Muse of Avalon is finally out. And currently is getting some love from reviewers and some of the first buyers, which is always very exciting.

I’m going to get a bit more data on that in the next progress report. So look forward for that. I will look forward for that for sure. The other thing that I did was I applied for a couple of Kobo promotion this time. It’s a first time for me because it’s not in English, but it is in Italian.

So Kobo is featuring a promotion in French and in Italian. And this is the first time for me to submit books in that language. I don’t know how it’s going to go with the Italian book, so we’ll keep you updated on that.

And finally, I am sorting things out and I’m basically shipping, selling stuff, and I’m preparing to move back to Italy in this couple of months and is very exciting. I’m very excited to meet my family and friends. Most of them are there. And it’s been a very long time that I didn’t see them for an extended period.

And with all the stuff going on in the world it’s nice to be near to your friends and family. At the same time there is all the bureaucratic stuff to be done, packages to be sent. You don’t want to know that, you just want to know that I’m very excited about this and that in a couple of months time, if everything goes well, I will be under the Italian blue sky.

And what happened to you Crystal, my dear?

Crystal Hunt: Well, I am moving also, both of us are in a moving of house phase, so there’s plenty of disruption, so packing and prepping for that and figuring out how to move through businesses as well as our home and do that with a minimum of disruption. So all of that is underway to support that and the shift into a new space and some new patterns.

Whenever you’re making a major change in your life it’s the perfect time to switch up your habits a little bit because the new environment is the perfect opportunity to hit that reset button. And I’ve been reading Atomic Habits again. I know we talked about this one before on the podcast. Is one of my favourites. I reread it roughly once a year. And usually when I’m doing a reset of whatever my focus stuff is, and I find with spring coming, it’s nicer outside, we just had the time change this past weekend as well. So we have sprung into spring as it were, and we are ready to get outside a little bit more walking, a little bit more active and really a shift, shifting gears, in terms of what I’m writing in terms of what I’m doing on a daily basis and really yeah excited to launch all of that out into the world. 

So writing, I am working on Create with Co-authors. So we’re at the stage where all three of us have written our parts and we mashed them all up together. And then each of us goes through the manuscript again from start to finish to make sure that there’s no gaps in everything we need to be filled out is filled out. And once all three of us have done that one at a time in a row, it tends to be much more polished. So at that point, it’ll go off for editing and get really polished up. But for now, just making sure there’s no gaps and that we haven’t left out anything that we really wanted you to know about writing with coauthors and how all of that works.

That book is set to launch in May. So you will see it coming your way before too long. We’ll start sharing links and things. And on the very, very fun side of things, the world building is what I’m working on right now with my author assistant. So we’re getting ready to reboot Rivers End. It’s been two years since I was really releasing fiction.

I went all in on nonfiction during that time period, which has been fantastic and gives me a really good career base to work off of and some nice stable income and all of those good things that we like, but I’m ready to have some fun. And we have been setting up the Spotify Channel and working on Rivers End radio and setting up the website.

There’s a shiny new website to come working on the book clubs sign up and there’s a newspaper for Rivers End. It’s very immersive in terms of the special features and the fun stuff for readers to be able to really feel like they’ve moved to town and they are part of the action. And I’m really excited to roll that out.

And it is so hard to sit on it. I usually just put things out there as soon as they’re ready and this time I’m trying something very different where I’m holding back the books, I’m holding back all of the, everything, until it’s all ready to go so that we have a really good head start because last time I think started to ramp up and I could not keep up with the production schedule as well as all the marketing stuff.

And this time around the experiment involves sitting on things for longer than I like to sit on them and it feels like nothing’s happening, but actually tons is happening in the background. So I will keep you all posted on how that works. And when we start rolling things out, it’ll be fun to see how all of it comes together.

But for today, we are going to talk about how reading works with, or for, or against our writing and how that impacts us as authors when changes happen to our reading patterns and schedules and preferences and all of those things. And it’s going to be a little less resources focused and a little more conversation focused.

Cause I think this is an interesting topic to dive into and I know a lot of people in the author groups that I belong to have been talking about how this past year has really seen some changes to their reading habits and their attention and how they’re reading and what they’re reading and how that’s impacting their writing.

So I think it’s very timely for us to have a little chat and as the world is opening up again in a lot of ways and, immunizations are coming and people are ready to get back outside and be interacting a bit more, I think it’ll be interesting to restart or shift some of that as well.

Back to our habits chat and how it’s a good time to shake things up when there are changes, there are lots of changes of foot in the world right now. So it’s a great time to just take a little look at how things are working in your life and whether you want to make some changes to your author patterns and habits as well.

So Michele, I’m curious. What role does reading play in your writing? Do you think -like how do you think those two things work together for you? 

How does reading play into your writing?

Michele Amitrani: I think this is going to be, as you said, very interesting discussion. At the same time, it’s going to be slightly weird. And just on my point, because I think you’re always going to be sound and lovely. But I’m going to tell you a couple of things today about what I do with my reading and how I tried to apply what I learned from my reading to my writing. As you all know, I was born in Italy, so I am an Italian mother tongue and English is my second language.

I tried to consider it as a very close second, but the truth is that it’s not. So there are a lot of things and a lot of time that I don’t quite understand what has been said in a way the speaker of that language is saying it. And the same happens when I’m reading. So if there is something that I’m reading in a book, and I think it means something, I translate it into Italian and then I go search it and it doesn’t mean that at all. So it’s funny, but at the same time it’s a measure… It helps explain to you a bit why my situation is a bit different I would say. So there is this question that we have: What is the role of your reading or what is the role that reading plays in your writing? In mine is two-folds. The first one is I just enjoy reading and I don’t think about that much when I’m reading in Italian, which it… it actually didn’t happen for a few years because I was just fully immersed in the English front. 

And I was afraid that by reading Italian, I would not be as motivated to read in English as I am now. So the first part is just reading for enjoying, but the second part is I try to read to learn more the language that is written, not spoken; written.

Because my big problem or …  big challenge, let’s call it a challenge, is that I have to write in English for an English audience if I want to make a living for my publishing business. So I want to basically tell you 100% what is my feeling about reading. And I have to say sometimes it’s frustrating. So the role that reading plays in my life might be, or might get, frustrating. But when I just switch on enjoying the story and I don’t have to think anything, grammar or syntax, I’m fine. I don’t have any problem. The problem is that my brain doesn’t allow me to just enjoy the story because as soon as I don’t understand something, either I need to check it online, and so I have to stop and I have to understand, okay, what has been said here? And that second I basically reproach myself and I’m like: you’ve been know living in Canada for nine to then almost 10 years.

How come you don’t know that? It’s two-fold for this reason: It’s a great possibility and I know that I’ve learned a lot from my reading in this past 10 years, but at the same time, I can see the difference, for example, between me and Crystal. There are so many times that I have to ask you Crystal. Last time, if you remember, I was coming to you and I was saying: Why do you say you are either in the red or in the black when it comes to accounting? Why is not in the green? Because for me, green is a positive thing, and she had to explain to me, this is a stupid, maybe small example, but there are thousands more that span when you’re reading fiction and non-fiction. I would say that’s the answer to that question. The role that reading is playing in re in my writing so far, and I’m sure your answer to that question is going to be completely different from mine. What do you think of that Crystal? 

Crystal Hunt: It’s … for me, they’re very interlinked and I have always read a phenomenal amount, like an unusual amount.

I read my way through the entire library when I was a little kid, my parents used to do fundraisers for the school so that they could get more books to put in the library. And a book a day was not unusual for most of my life. And obviously with non-fiction that’s sense and fat and more like a textbook. It takes a little longer than that because you have to actually absorb things, but I’ve always spent a great deal of my leisure time reading. I haven’t had cable ever actually my parents didn’t have cable when I was little, we worked a lot. And as an adult, it seemed like a good way to actually accomplish things and I could put all that money into buying books.

And so that’s what I did. So now having Netflix and Crave and a few other streaming services is the most TV access I think I’ve ever had in my whole life. But my husband and I have made a conscious decision at various phases of our lives, that we would be much more creative and productive if we didn’t have TV in that way.

So we’d go see movies or whatever, if we wanted sort of short-term entertainment, but it’s much easier to resist the temptation of just bingeing 17 seasons of it. Whatever show is the current favourite, if you’re not actually having access to it. So that, that’s been a really integral part of who I am and what I do and what my days look like.

And yeah, so it’s really interlinked in that. And I think we’ll dig into some of the specific ways as we go forward here, but it helps inform what I am writing because I tend to read in the same areas as what I’m writing. And I do definitely go through phases. So that has changed a lot over time.

I have gone through phases where all I read was horror or all I read was fantasy or all I read was science fiction or medical thrillers, or spy novels. And of course, romance as well has been there in the background the whole way through. And it’s been really interesting just to see how those elements of whatever phase I’m in, in terms of ingesting information comes out in the books as well and what I’m writing.

So that’s always been really interesting. Do you write the same kinds of fiction as you read Michele? Or do you have some variation there? 

Do you read the same kind of books that you write?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I usually, when I’m reading a specific genre, for example, now it’s historical fiction with my mythological logical fantasy, I do try to get as much as I can books in that genre.

So for example, now I’m reading The Song of Achilles and that’s a mythological fantasy slash Fantasy fiction book. I am trying to read those kinds of books because I think they help also my writing. But there are definitely, as it happened to you that were faced in my life that I would read just science fiction a hundred percent and I wouldn’t even open a book that was maybe fantasy or any sub genre that it wasn’t with space ship or space battles. There was a time in which I just read the Star Trek books. Nothing else. So I think it varies. It changes maybe when you grow up or when you find something else that you’re interested in.

I’m sure that you also had the the maybe Harry Potter phase. There was a time in which I just read and re-read Harry Potter. I think the first book I read it like 11, 12 times something crazy. Let’s not explore too much further the subject. But yeah, it depends a lot on the timing and it depends on what are my interest in that moment.

And there is I think a question related to this one, which is if we read the different kinds of books maybe at different stages of our writing? So if you are writing a book, maybe, I don’t know, it’s a huge Epic Fantasy, and maybe you are constantly reading Epic Fantasy and at sometimes you find yourself like wanting to read a thriller, something completely different.

I have to say it happened to me. There was a phase in which I was reading non fiction and this nonfiction was investment books. So a weird and maybe sub-genre of nonfiction that, a person doesn’t expect to read just for pleasure, but I was reading it for pleasure and I liked it.

And actually I got a couple of stories idea out of that. Just I couldn’t find the story frame or a character to populate that story. So I don’t know if that happens to you that you have to shift maybe from one genre to the other what kind of kinds of books maybe at different stages while you are writing a book? Has it ever happened to you Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I’m pretty careful about what I read when in the process, because what I’m reading has a huge influence on what comes out when I sit down at the keyboard to write. So I am very careful about that and I’ve learned myself and my own kind of tendencies over time enough to know what can work and what doesn’t.

So for me, I find that when I’m writing a non-fiction book, I will have a phase before I go into writing mode where my writing time is all actually reading time and I will get my hands on every book that relates to the topic that I’m writing on that I can find. It’s like doing a lit review when you’re writing an academic paper.

The first thing you do is find out what has everybody else done and said on this topic? Because you don’t want to—you don’t want to say the same things. You wanna say different things in a different way, and really be complimenting what other people are saying, as opposed to just repeating what other people are saying.

The only way to know what other folks are saying is if you’ve read it. And so for me, that is the starting place for any new non-fiction book is buy or go to the library or borrow everything that I can find on that topic. Read it all, make some notes about what was covered, where and what are the commonalities between the books?

What are the things that everybody is saying should be included or are important in the process? What are the things that are different in different approaches? And then trying to look at why are they different? What perspective does each of these people have? Because most people, even if you’re coming at the same topic, you’re coming at it from a different angle.

And then figuring out what is my own angle to approach that topic. And because of my background as a health psychologist, and because of my different experiences in publishing, there’s often a different spin on things. And, for any of you, who’ve read our Creative Academy Guides for Writers,  there’s a certain amount of humour, there’s a certain amount of personal storytelling that’s in there, there’s a certain amount of, I think, clear information as well, but there’s also a tendency to try to think at least a little bit outside the box and to give you some options and ideas that maybe haven’t been focused on before.

And that’s hugely impactful. When it comes to fiction though I have trouble in that, I am a bit of a mimic, so I have to be really careful if I—when I lived in Ireland, I was there for six weeks and I already sounded like I was from Ireland. I pick up the accent really fast and the same thing happens with writing.

If I’m not careful about limiting what I’m reading, then the voice that comes out isn’t necessarily mine. And so when I’m researching a book, I’ll read everything I can get my hands on while I’m developing all my characters in my plots. I’ll read a lot of stuff in the genre that I’m writing in.

So if I’m doing a romantic suspense, I’ll read all romantic suspense for a month which is a lot of books. And then I’ll shift into I have to read my own books again before I write the next one in the series. So I don’t always read all of them, but I will definitely read the book right before it in the series.

And often I’ll read two or three of the shorter ones, just so that I set my own voice in my head again, and make sure that like a pallet cleanser, if you’re having a fancy meal, you have a little bit of sorbet or something in between to make sure that your palate has been cleansed and you’re not tasting whatever you ate or drank before.

It’s a fresh start, and that’s what I do. But I use my own books as pallet cleansers so that I make sure that I am not accidentally mimicking anybody else, but whatever I’m doing is my own, but I won’t read. Usually when I’m writing fiction, I will read nonfiction and vice versa when I’m writing non-fiction I’ll be reading fiction because that way I don’t have to worry about accidentally picking it up. And I have a very strong, written memory. So I really have trained myself, as I’m reading something to be changing the words in my head so that I’m encoding the basic information or the story, but it’s not going in exactly, so that I don’t recall accidentally someone else’s words just as they were written, because that used to get me in trouble on tests, sometimes. I would quote chunks of the textbook and the teachers would get very suspicious. And that was a little bit of a thing. So I learned how to not remember things exactly. The downside of that is that I am terrible at remembering quotes because when I read it, I immediately changed the words in my head so that I wasn’t going to accidentally plagiarize it.

But it means that I cannot recall exactly a joke or a quote, or unless I have it written in front of me, I will completely mangle it. So there you go. There’s a fun fact and my husband thinks it’s hilarious. Cause he has the opposite. He remembers things exactly as they are there. And so we have a good time comparing notes on what was actually the quote that I’m bungling up when I’m trying to tell a story.

So he’s a great reference text for that. Okay so have you ever had a phase where you found yourself not really able to read for one reason or another? 

Have you ever had difficulties with reading?

Michele Amitrani: A few years ago, I read an article from the Atlantic which was titled ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’

And that was a requirement for an online course that I was taking. And basically this article is saying, this is just something that article says it’s not the only one: it says that our attention span is very short now. The writer, if I’m not mistaken, on this article, he was saying something like: because of technology nowadays and the way we search for information, we cannot possibly concentrate on something like a book as easily as before, because there are so many distractions.

I find something of that to be true. Fortunately for me it doesn’t happen to me. When I am into a book and I’m into the story, I can read a lot of it, but I do find out that I need some pause in between. And I do think that our brain has been wired a bit differently than maybe one or two generations ago.

I don’t know if 100% of what this article says is true. I just can’t say that it is happening in some way or another to the way I interact with writing. So that will be interesting to know. If something like this also happens to you? Like attention span wise, or if you like, for example, Atomic Habits, which is a book that you read than re-read, can you just read it completely and utterly maybe from cover to cover, or is something that is even difficult to, if you’re into a book for example, when you were younger, you could read one romance book a day.

Do you think nowadays, in 2021, could that happen again? Or your brain has been wired differently? 

Crystal Hunt: Um, in general, I don’t—I don’t have a problem once I’m into something, I will just go for it. I do everything like that in my life is, I’m a binge writer, I’m a binge reader, I’m all the things.

And so it’s very much … when I get into it, I’m all the way in and I don’t really have trouble staying in it normally. This year has been an exception and I’ve been fine with non-fiction for whatever reason, nonfiction I can still read it, I can still write it. I’m processing everything fine, but fiction for me, this is the only year in my life where I’ve, I think I’ve read…12 fiction books in the past 12 months and eight of them are in the last month. So I read almost nothing in fiction for the entire 2020. And I think partly that is because it takes a lot of energy to imagine a reality that’s different from what is in front of you, from what you’re living and fiction, both reading and writing of it, requires you to be a hundred percent able to buy into a new reality.

You’re basically using the energy of your mind to take the words on the page, turn it into a real life happening in your brain, so it’s like making your own movies out of pictures and out of words that you’re getting from a book, and immersing yourself in the emotions of other people and the lives of other people and all of these complications and problems that are facing your characters.

And I think I just hit a wall and there was more than enough requirements for me to embrace a reality that I couldn’t have imagined in what happened this year. And I was using all of my energy to really envision my own reality in a way that let me keep going through all of what was going on and the idea of taking on someone else’s emotional pain in a story, in addition to everything that’s going on in our personal lives, in the real world at the moment it lost the fun that it usually has. And normally I love characters being tortured by all kinds of conflict and problems. That’s fantastic, but not so much in the last little while.

And I think it really—that was very challenging in terms of what I fill my time with and in terms of how I spend my leisure time and what I get excited about. And it really, it had a huge impact over this past year and the impact on my writing was one that I hadn’t really realized how closely tied the reading and the writing were, because I don’t normally read fiction when I’m writing fiction in my head.

I thought they were two different things that they weren’t really that linked, but in reality, they’re much more closely linked than I realize, even though they don’t take place simultaneously, they’re part of the same long string of actions that need to happen together in order to keep that creative machine going.

So it was a really interesting realization to come to and had me questioning a lot of who I am. Being a reader is the number one way I would have defined myself for most of my life, even more so than writing because before I ever I think I wrote my first book when I was in, middle school or something.

But even before that, I was reading really early. And I read my way through my whole life. My whole life is bookmarked by the books that I read during certain times, or what I learned from different things. And it was very disorienting to have that removed from my toolbox of things that were in my life.

So yeah, it was really interesting in terms of the impact that it did have. So let’s talk about—cause I know I’m not the only one out there who’s been struggling with fiction, and in fact, David Gawker and sent a newsletter around just a couple of weeks ago that I felt super relieved to read because he was talking about having that same block, that he’s had a huge problem with fiction for the last year. And I just let out this sigh of relief and I thought, okay, this is something we should be talking about because in our community, in the Creative Academy, we have, roughly a thousand people and so many authors are talking about having trouble, either with fiction or nonfiction in the reading. Some people are great in the fiction and some are not so much but they have been fighting the other way around.

And for some folks there was some really great suggestions that were shared in terms of if you’ve been in a dry spell reading wise and maybe also writing wise, how could you shift some things to maybe jump back in or to break that cycle of stuckness? And one of the things that was suggested was to try a different genre.

And I know a couple of my friends have been really reading a lot of historical or sci-fi fantasy or thrillers. And when you look at the market reports that have been coming out from the different companies, they support that. And I personally, I think because reality is already altered in a lot of those things.

When you’re reading historical fiction, we’re jumping back in time and we are embracing a reality that’s already happened. It’s very static. We know exactly what the parameters were and that’s not going to change. And when it’s scifi fantasy it’s often very different from our current reality anyway, and that’s okay because that’s our escape, we get to go outside of the everyday, and that can be a nice way to escape. And I found my way back in was through stuff that was larger then life, but with very concrete problems. 

So I’ve been reading the romantic suspense because you have a bad guy, you have an individual or a team of people who get together to figure out what the problem is and stop the bad guy. There’s a love story woven in, which is fun, you get your happily ever after at the end and that little boost of dopamine and you get to feel good about all of that. And then the problem is solved and you get to move on. And there’s something about that cycle of completion that things are solved and wrapped up and taken care of and there’s no loose ends at the end of the story, or if it’s a series are, cause there’s just a hint of a loose end enough to drag you into the next book, but not enough to leave you feeling like things are completely unsolved. So that’s been really interesting.

The other thing that was very effective actually, and again, a lot of folks have been talking about this where people are… if they’re having trouble concentrating, they’re rewatching things that they’ve already seen on TV or they’re rereading books that they’ve read before, because they know roughly what happens and you can retrain your brain to focus on those things and get back into the groove with something that’s not an unknown quantity.

So it takes that new element out of it. And it makes it just that much easier. I think to picture what’s going on and to get into the characters and to figure out how it all fits together when it’s something you’ve seen before. So that—I don’t know if you’ve heard people talking about that or if you’ve had any experience? Have you yourself been going back to familiar favourites or have you stayed in the realm of the new?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah, because of my 12 by 20 challenge, I was trying to read as much different things as possible. So I went from urban fantasy slash dark fantasy to epic fantasy. When I dived in for example, the first very big book by Brandon Sanderson The Way of Kings. I have experienced and experimented for sure in 2020. 

I also have to say, usually I go back to my familiar place, which is science fiction and fantasy. I very rarely read other genres even with this pandemic. I just find that I know what I want to write, or at least I think I know what I want to write, and I just believe that by reading this genre my construction and the way a book is crafted in that genre, the plot, the characters and the tropes, also the tropes, which are very specific genre wise, increased in time.

That is not to be saying that you shouldn’t read other genres. I think you should read other genre because when it’s the time that in the science fiction space opera the main guy and the lovely lady or the partner, needs to kiss you don’t want to start from scratch. And I think if you read a lot of romances you don’t panic when you have to write that kissing scene, even though it’s a science fiction book.

So I do think it’s important for you to read outside of the comfort zone. Since we are talking about the difficulty of translating my Italian into English. So I do think you have to be brave in that regard. I’ve been trying to do that especially in 2020. I’ve been reading books that I usually wouldn’t have read and the past.

Again, going outside our comfort zone is important. And if there is something that we can take from this staying at home, forced staying at home, is that if we reach out to things that are unfamiliar, sometimes we get unfamiliar things that in the future we can use in our writing. So at least that’s what happened to me.

I will never have thought in a million years, two years or three years ago, to read an historical fiction, not in a million year. I came from, space opera, Ender’s Game, this kind of books and nothing else. So I do think my taste changed in the meantime, and I do believe what you said about the experience of the people in the Creative Academy helped understand how going outside our comfort zone can influence how writing in the long term.  

Crystal Hunt: Okay. If you are not yet on our mailing list, get thee, to the strategicauthorpreneur.com website and make sure you are on our mailing list. And we’re going to send you out a little prompt question, cause we’re curious what your experience with reading has been over this past year and you know what, how your reading works with your writing as well.

So make sure you hit reply on that and give us an answer, we would love to hear from you. And if you have questions you’d like us to answer on the show or a topic suggestion, please email them to crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will add them to the list. Feel free, of course, to hit that By Us a Coffee button, if you find the show helpful. Every $5 helps us keep the shows coming and keep our productions ads free. So we all don’t have to be annoyed by commercial, which is great. 

Okay. Everybody happy writing, happy reading. And we’ll be back in your ears next week. 

Michele Amitrani: We’ll see you. Thank you for listening. Bye bye. 

Crystal Hunt: Bye.