There are two things I dislike about being a writer.

The first is that I enjoy reading less. The second is that I don’t have much time to read anyway. And that’s tough for someone who started reading so young she can’t remember how she learned.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of reading. The joy of snuggling up in front of the fire on a cold winter’s night in one of those soft and lumpy armchairs with a book I hadn’t read. Waking up on a hot Christmas morning, the sun already heating up the unlined zinc roof overhead, knowing that there would be a new book in my stocking, (bestowed by wise parents who didn’t want kids waking them up too early).

Reading everything a zillion times because there were never enough books. Loving it when I was nine and new neighbours moved in on a farm half a mile or so away with a library of books that they didn’t mind lending. Loving it when I was ten and my sister started university and began bringing home all those lovely, lovely books by people I’d never heard of with wonderfully exotic Russian and French and Jewish and German names…

There was no T.V., of course, and we lived in a household that “went to the flicks” much less often than we visited the dentist. The only library was at school, and books were rationed like wartime coffee. We were allowed to change a single book once a week. (Perhaps it was reverse psychology on the teachers’ part—to inculcate a love of reading by making it an almost forbidden treat? If so, it worked. Reading was a wonder, a joy, and a new book was indeed something delicious to be savoured. Of course, being kids, we bookworms got around the rationing. We each took out one book, read it and passed it on.)

Now, however, whenever I read for pleasure, there is almost always part of me that is observing the tools used by the author. The plot devices. The dialogue tricks. The way they have built characters or shifted a scene, or foreshadowed an event. I note the clumsy phrase and think to myself, “Well I would have done that another way…”

It’s a pain. I want to get lost in a good book the way I did as a child. I want that sense of immersion, of being somewhere else, of being someone else. And very, very occasionally it does happen. There comes along a writer who whisks me away from this world with such a deft touch, not just for a page or two, but for a whole book. And I’ll read anything they write, any time. And I think, Ah, if only I could write like that…

The second downside to being a published writer are those things called deadlines. Terry Pratchett might get a kick out of the sound of them whooshing past, but all they stir up in me is a sense of guilt whenever I sit down to read. I feel like that same little girl who used to read under the bedcovers with a torch, long past her bedtime, devouring the Myths of Greece and Rome, or one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, or The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw—probably all in the same week. I didn’t discriminate back in those days. I just read.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Tuesday, 14 March 2006 (11 Comments).