I Stopped Writing as Soon as I Stopped Reading
This correlation seems to be more than just a coincidence…
I genuinely loved writing when I first started on Medium. It was therapeutic and the perfect way to feel productive while I was unemployed. With Covid-19 keeping people indoors with less to do and more to think about, writing became a powerful outlet for me to get my thoughts into the universe. Whether or not someone ever read those thoughts was completely irrelevant to me, it was just the act of writing which gave me more purpose to my day-to-day.
During the height of Covid-19 in Western Australia, I spent a lot of my time reading books. It was something I have always loved but is always the first thing to fall to the wayside when I get busy. As life has begun to return to some kind of normality (what even is normal anymore? That’s an entire article within itself…), I had less and less time available to read and my desire to write seemed to be reduced dramatically as well. This got me thinking… Was my desire to write purely stimulated from my love of reading?
Writing became a small challenge for me. All of the emotions I was getting from reading these books, was something I wanted to be able to generate in other people myself. A 2006 study published in NeuroImage found that when writers choose words which stimulate a sensory experience such as “velvet” or “perfume”, in some cases the brain cannot make a distinction between reading this word and encountering it in real life [March 2019]. Finding out this gave me so much insight into why the books I had been reading fed my soul while I wasn’t able to leave my house. After not having written for several weeks, it does feel nice to have some inspiration spur me to write, but that inspiration came from reading another article. For me to write more, do I just have to constantly read? It’s not something I ever considered to have to go hand in hand, but the inspiration I have after reading something is tremendous compared to when I haven’t read at all.
I want to challenge myself to read more and write more in the coming months to determine how I source my inspiration, because if I can determine this, then my creative career could improve immensely. I have felt so held back to write some times because of lack of inspiration, or the lack of emotion felt behind the story. When I feel passionate about something I find the words just seem to flow. It’s not clunky. It’s not hard. It’s just natural.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” — Stephen King
Not only am I a writer with so much to learn, but I am a writer who needs to find my tool for inspiration so I can write more. I get the feeling I am certainly not alone in this feeling, so I urge you to take on this challenge with me to consume more thought-provoking writing and to write more!
