I love reading and I love books and I love my library. It is a small library, but good enough for me. I digress.
I start books, I leave them, I come back to them. Some catch my attention and I continue reading, some catch my attention and fail to deliver and I just abandon. It happened to me to abandon a book after 400 pages, or after 50. Sometimes I feel cheated. A book starts out well and then it just drags on, sometimes there is just a mismatch between me and the story or the way it is written.
As I see my stories, so I see the stories I read and sometimes I need to take a break from certain books just because they are too much, but I still like them.
I love reading and I love books and I love my library.
Recently I started a new book. I started it out of curiosity, to see how it is written. Although its writer is very well known and much loved I have never before read a book written by them. I remember trying to read one once but it did not catch me so I left it. But this one, I love. I truly enjoy and it makes me happy.
I think as a writer that is the most that you can wish for, for your work to make your readers happy.
Of course, as a wanna be writer I always am trying to learn from the books I am reading, and I was thinking, why do I love this book so much? What is it about it that makes me read a page or two when I have a bit of free time? Is it the story? Is it the characters? What is it?
You will laugh to find out that it is not the story and it is not the characters. I mean for sure they contribute to the great quality of the book, but taken by themselves they are not outstanding, but the whole that is where the magic happens.
I like it because of the way it is written. It is the whole package. The world the characters move in, the objects that surround them, their existence and traits, their movement in the story. Writing this I realize that this book reminds me of the classics I used to read when I was little. It reminds me of them because it has proper characters, moving in a proper universe within a proper story, timeline.
I mean, I also like artifices and surprises, but when they enhance the story not just done because of a need to be different.
I think, writing a good, proper story, without artifices is often more difficult than ‘innovating’ as, as they say, ‘there is nowhere to hide’.
I am so happy when I find a book I really love, it brings back this feeling I had when I was little and I would pick a random book from my mom’s library and it would just bowl me over, making me wonder how had I lived before reading it and looking longingly at all those books and wondering what other great stories lie hidden there, in those neatly packed pages.
It helps thinking about what I love in a story, because it makes it easier for me to understand what I want to have in my own stories.
It makes me sad that I have to fight myself for every word I write, but well, we each have our own path to walk on. This is mine.
