I want to read more. One of my goals this year is to read at least one book a month. That book for January was supposed to be Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. But look at January, it just went and flew by. In three days it’s going to be February and I don’t so much as have a copy of Song of Solomon in my possession.
Maybe I’ll just bump it to February. Like I said, I haven’t read that book, but I know it’s one I want to buy. Towards the beginning of this month, I actually Googled the book for purchase. I want the one with the yellow cover, and hardback.
It’s that book’s title that introduced me to its author Toni Morrison vis a vis the Oprah Winfrey show when she was doing her book club. I remember she chose it as a selection. That was back when I was trying to read all the books in Oprah’s Book Club. I bought the first one, The Deep End of the Ocean, and read it. I don’t remember if I read all of it, but I do remember that I wasn’t really into it.
But back to Toni Morrison. If memory serves me correctly, Oprah used to say that Toni Morrison (why do I keep using her first and last name?) was the greatest writer ever. And there was this one episode where a lady in the audience challenged her and said it’s actually Zora Neale Hurston.
Once again, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston before that, now oh how I love her writing – let me count the ways. I don’t necessarily like her stories – the stories she tells with her writing – but oh how I love her writing.
Anyway, this woman in the audience was saying how Zora Neale Hurston is the best writer, and I think Oprah went to break or something then came back reading a passage out of Song of Solomon, and I was wowed. I was like I gotta get my hands on that book. I have to read that book. Over two decades later, I still haven’t read it. But I will. I will.
I actually haven’t read any books this month…well, a bit of the Bible, but that doesn’t count. That’s for different reasons.
But yeah, I definitely want to step it up this year. I am, after all, a writer. And they say in order to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. I don’t know how much truth to that there is. I’ve never been a reader.
I used to watch this book show on PBS and the host said that she loved reading so much that should would read the writing on a tube of toothpaste to get her kicks in. I cannot relate. I was more of a TV watcher when I was a child…and teen…and young adult, hell even now.
I prefer a movie to a book, or even a TV show. When MTV used to do marathons of The Real World? Oh, that was bliss. But not only that, reading has never been my strong suit. I was always better in math. I did better in math on my SAT and my GRE than I did in reading and writing even. I think doing math on a regular basis made me a better writer, not reading.
All that logical reasoning involved in math just made me a problem solver. It’s like it almost eliminated writer’s block, because my mind was already teed up to find solutions, create solutions. When I stopped doing math on a regular basis, writing became harder. At least that’s what it seems like.
It may also have gotten harder because there is a burden that comes along with knowing you’re good at something, or being told you’re good at something. With that comes the pressure of wanting to always be good at it. It’s like now that you told me I’m good, I want everything I write to elicit that same reaction. And when inevitably it doesn’t, that’s when anxiety sets in. That’s when writer’s block is born.
I’d pinpoint my writing genesis back to when I was in the fourth grade. It all started haphazardly. I was going to a new school, a mixed school, the first time I went to a school where most of the students weren’t black. I remember the popular girls there having diaries, so of course, I wanted one too. And that’s how I began writing on a regular basis.
I wasn’t writing with any particular intention – just writing about my feelings, writing about the day. It became a thing, it became an inconsistent friend or maybe I it’s in consistent friend. But oddly enough, I was never really fond of writing, especially not in school.
Then fast forward to the 11th grade. The first day of English class. The teacher passes out the syllabus and on it it says every six weeks a paper will be due. I cringed at the thought of writing a paper that often. Then as we’re going over the syllabus she makes a correction. “Scratch out the every six weeks part, “ she said. That’s more like it I thought. “A paper will be due every three weeks,” she concluded. I was horrified.
I don’t know when my procrastination started, but by the 11th grade, it was already in full force. I hated writing papers so bad that I literally couldn’t write them until the last-minute, when I knew it was do or die, then all of a sudden a burst of competency would come over me and enable me to write the paper. So I would write my paper the night before, sometimes even in my second period computer class and turn it in in my fourth period English class. I did that every three weeks, and every three weeks I would always get an A. I was shocked, especially since this was the hardest English teacher there, and nobody else except for one other girl (who was a reader by the way – she used to read Stephen King books in high school. I don’t know how hard his books are, as I’ve never read him, but I just thought that was advanced).
After that, I couldn’t help but think I was good. That is, until I got to college, and my journalism professor practically excoriated everything I wrote. Then later I worked for a newspaper and the same articles, that my journalism professor tore apart helped me to get the job (I was an obits clerk), and I was told how well I wrote.
So I said all that to say…actually, now I don’t even know where I was going with that. Oh yes, now I remember, I think. I said all that to say, I’m a writer who’s not a reader. Reading’s never really been my thing. Over the past, maybe 10 years or so, I’ve gotten into non-fiction, just because I marvel at the thought that they are true stories. But there is something about a good fiction book that hits like no other—the only problem is, well, at least for me, it’s hard to come by a good fiction book.
But the good ones are such that it’s worth it to keep trying. So, Song of Solomon, I’m coming for ya…eventually.
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