Writers are crazy

(Old post)

If you think you’re a writer, the most dangerous thing you can do is a necessity. You must read others. Read the greats that have gone before, and read the goods you would look in the eye if they weren’t racing so far ahead.

A little reading leaves you feeling pleasantly buzzed, like a couple of beers on warm afternoon over light banter with a non-judgemental friend. It’s something you can go home and write about in your journal, and add a smiley face at the end of the entry even. The whole activity feels really healthy.

A moderate amount of reading can prop you up. Like that cheap coffee table with a short leg, that’s balanced on top of two second hand paperbacks. It makes you critical. It makes you imagine your mirror image looking back at you with great brown wings, a golden beak and a mad swiveling beady bird eye. You feel like you can tower about all those lowbrow peers of yours, when you’re actually standing tip-toe on your brains to achieve an illusion of height. You know enough words by now to be able to call yourself descriptive. Grammar and editors don’t scare you shitless, words don’t make you neurotic. Creation doesn’t make you euphoric. It makes you smart.

A lot of reading… OK, hold on because this is where you begin to go crazy. The roller coaster’s seat belts snap and you find the damn machines roaring down a convoluted rail, definitely not the same, sane one you espied while shifting from foot to foot on solid ground. The Books are all over your room now. You can hear them crawling around at night. In your head, of course. Words take on the dimension of a fragile glass with some very, very combustible substance inside. They’re pretty, and really fascinating too. But spooky as hell. So, it’s like you’re possessed. You must have more of these strange things, because you’re addicted to them by now. But they’re of so many bloody kinds, they make you feel really inadequate. You spend hours in your own head, frantically making more of these glass bombshells, trying to arrange them in the most explosive way possible, and running out in the middle of it all to see what others have done/are doing, how close are they to exploding in your face, oh hell, you need to get back.. make More More More!

Are you going crazy, yet?