Reading and Writing

No Arithmetic here.  Today, I want to focus on reading as a writer.  What are people's opinions on this?  I know some people think that reading a novel inspires them, but I disagree.

 In my creative writing degree, this semester alone, I have 12 novels to read fully. 12!  Isn't that a little excessive?  As a child, I was instilled with the love of reading.  My parents bought me all kinds of books which allowed me to expand my imagination.  I read all throughout my elementary education and even into middle school.  I think it was probably around 8th Grade when I stopped reading purely for pleasure.  Why? School.  As students, children are required to take English classes.  In those classes, reading becomes educational.  We dissect a novel on a chapter by chapter basis.  We have to read on a specific time-frame, for fear of not being prepared for a test.  If we fail that test, the result is poorer grades, which relates to our GPA, which colleges look at for admission.  So we are now being forced to read to better our education.  Doesn't this take something out of it?  Maybe I'm just out of practice.  I do still enjoy reading, just not always those authors I "should."

So... why do I not enjoy reading as a writer?  Isn't it important to keep up with what other creative minds in the field are doing? Look at what is working, what is not, what is selling, and what is not? Maybe.  But for me, its not the competition, its the inspiration.  I look, in the things I see and do, for something to inspire my ideas.  I want to set myself apart as a writer, be original.  I cannot, in good conscious, write something that lends itself to a particular idea, sentence, feel, or structure, of another novel.  So if I can't write down an idea, because I've already read it, a creative vein is closed off.  Soon I feel I would be limited in my ideas. This is just my rationale, please feel free to disagree.

You may ask: Jon? What about movies? What about television? Aren't there storylines here too?  Of course there are.  Television programs are based on a concept.  The original writer writes a pilot.  This pilot is one hour, or a half.  Producers then buy the rights to this concept, then keep creating similar plots based on the characters produced in the pilot.  These serialized stories are basically each the same.  A novel is simply just not structured in this way, so I do not feel cheapened by ideas claimed while watching them.  Same with movies, the simplified plots in the visual images are just not the same as written plots.

Certainly, my ideas are not all gleamed from "boob tube."  There are many various inspirations for my work.  I listen to music while I write.  The sound of the music actually helps me get into a particular mood to translate that mood onto the page.  People's conversations, lectures in class, artistic mediums, all lend themselves to my work.  I just feel hindered by reading novels.  I just hope that people will read mine someday.

Alright, that's today's rant.  Thanks for listening.