On Creative Reading
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Today’s SPELLPUNK post will be late, if it happens at all. You can thank my writer buddy, Ramez Naam for that. The other night, I started reading his debut novel, Nexus when I couldn’t sleep. Well, that lead to about four hours of sleep and a complete rewiring of my brain on how to handle certain points of view in SPELLPUNK, specifically Jet’s – who is the point-of-view character for the chapter scheduled to go out today.
What happened? Well, Mez (I can call him that, because he told me to at Worldcon last year) did something really interesting with some of his PoV stuff in the opening of Nexus that gave my imagination a jump start. Am I going to be copying his technique? Absolutely not! That would be the very essence of lame. But, as I was saying, his brilliant prose sparked a chain reaction in my brain as to how I could really flesh out Jet’s PoV in SPELLPUNK as well as really go to town on another piece I’ve been fiddling with since my time at San Francisco State University – but in very different ways from what I’m going to do with Jet.
This got me thinking about my first semester at SF State after transferring from my JC. I had four classes: Ancient Epic Tales, Literature of the Short Story, Fundamentals of Creative Writing, and Fundamentals of Creative Reading. Let me tell you, based on my previous experiences in classes that focused in reading in higher education, I was NOT looking forward to either the lit class or the creative reading. Oddly, they were the classes that I wound up enjoying most.
Basically both classes taught me how to look at other works of fiction as a writer rather than as a lit student. Even in the Lit. of the Short Story, the teacher would take about ten to fifteen minutes of each class to tell those of us who were Creative Writing majors what to look for in each story that we could then apply to our own writing. In Creative Reading, we learned t0 take that even further by taking something we’ve read completely outside of what we’re currently working on and using it for inspiration to enhance our project without the catalyst for that inspiration changing what we’re working on to being a copycat piece.
For example, when I dove back into SPELLPUNK after graduating, I wanted to try something new with my action sequences, to make things stand out a little differently, but I wasn’t sure what. Rather than look at other works of fantasy and science fiction for ideas, I went to other works, finally coming upon my favorite Hemingway story, “The Short and Happy Life of Frances Macomber.” I’ve read it many, many times, and going back into sparked a chain reaction of how I finally decided to handle the action/fight scenes from Slate and Dart’s points of view. An interview Brandon Sanderson gave where he talked about the difference between how he and Robert Jordan write fight/battle scenes made me rethink how I was going to do fights and action sequences with the other characters, because people all deal with stress in different ways and variety is the spice of fiction…er…life.
So, here I am now, reading my way through the brilliant near-future thriller Nexus, and it’s sending me down paths I’d never dreamed of when it comes to my fantasy, urban or otherwise. Even in the writing of this blog post, I’ve had to alt-tab out to make notes on changes to my upcoming Team Red Hand project. I haven’t had a book spark this level of imagination overdrive since I started the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson.
The down side to this is that now I have go back and redo every scene we see from Jet’s PoV… and then see how it works, or even IF it works, and if not, how to fix it so it does work. Might be a little bit before I can get back on track with the Monday and Friday posts, but I think those of you following SPELLPUNK will be satisfied with the brief pause.
Thanks to Ramez Naam for such an awesome book. Thanks to Angry Robot books for publishing such an awesome book. And finally, for piling on a huge stack of unexpected work, Mez, you are a jerk-face Dummy-head…But I’m only saying that because I’m jealous of your talent.
Tell me…What was the last book that really captured your imagination?
