By Ridge Harripersad
One of my mentors in the Professional Writing & Communications program at Humber College told our class that what we read is so important to our writing abilities.
I believe in this wholeheartedly.
I was an avid reader even before I came out of my mother’s womb. She would read me all kinds of children’s stories, occasionally some romance novels. She has a whole collection of those romance stories.
When I came out of the womb, I absorbed books like a sponge. I read books from all genres: adventure, mystery, horror, life, you name it.
Then, when I was around twelve, books started to become shoved into the dark corners of my mind. As my self-identity formed, my love of books decayed. I gained more friends, played video games, signed up for school clubs, caught up with new anime series; it was a somewhat typical young adult transition.
I partially regret the ten years that followed my pre-pubescent years because it wasn’t until my twenties I came to a realization.
My writing was horrible.
Around the time I was about eleven, I started writing short stories for my free writing period in school. It was the best period ever; I had 30 minutes to work on writing a story with a prompt provided by our teacher, and then share it with the class.
I remember writing so many comedic action short story series. One of the iconic series revolved around a strange wolf-like creature randomly killing its victims while the victims tried to fight back in the most ridiculous ways.
I will always remember the characters, Tic, Tac, and Toe (yes, really bad names, I know!) trying to fight the creature with “fully-automatic shotguns”, or something along those lines. Everyone in class would be excited to see if the creature could ever be killed…SPOILER ALERT! I don’t think the creature can be killed.
From eleven years old, I knew I wanted to write. And for the longest time, I thought mastering the craft of writing was by simply writing more. So, that’s what I did. I kept writing short stories and trying to make the stories more unique in some way.
I tried to do a lot of horror and dystopian stories around the time The Hunger Games first got published. I remember asking my parents to buy me a copy of it from the Scholastic catalogue our school advertised and updated every month. You heard it here first, I was a Katniss fan before anyone!
The point is reading is the number one fertilizer for growth in writing.
It may seem like reading is taking away time from writing. However, reading shows readers what they already know while planting a seed for bending the real world to their imagination.
In simple terms, your imagination brain grows more as you read more.
So many writing benefits are from reading: your vocabulary expands, your knowledge of new ideas or things grow, and even finding your writing voice can come from reading various authors with different writing styles.
Hopefully, you don’t make the same mistakes I did!
The cool thing about reading
To learn more about the benefits of reading, read this article from Healthline.
Water that imagination brain and keep on reading!
Ridge Harripersad 