By Rob D. Young
One of the most often repeated lessons for writers is the importance of reading. As Stephen King put it, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” However, reading alone is not enough. If you want to read in a way that trains your writer’s eye, active engagement is required. Here are some tips for maximizing your learning during the reading process.
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 Edward Lear On this day in 1846, Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense was published. This was the first of his four “nonsense” books, and Lear was the first in a golden half-century of English nonsense that would include Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc. Beneath the light-heated limericks the biographers see a misfit’s lifelong attempt to cope and cover-up. |
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By Rob D. Young
You hop on your computer to write. Three hours later, you’ve written a whole lot—in Facebook posts, Twitter updates, forum posts, instant messages, and emails—but your story has moved along like a legless turtle. Sound familiar?
We could just disconnect from the web, but somehow having an active connection feels like a requirement for doing anything on a computer. Why do we rely on the internet so fully? How has this led us to “digital dependency”? And how can we get ourselves to log off so we can more effectively write on?
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 Ezra Pound On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound’s personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry — the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason. |
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 On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin’s Reign of Terror, Mandelstam became the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly because of his poetry — most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets — and partly because of his wife, who salvaged his work and told his story in her memoir, Hope Against Hope. |
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 On this day in 1997 Elspeth Huxley died. Huxley married into the famous family name, but she had her own success with a lifetime of journalism and some thirty books in many genres. One of these was the best-seller, The Flame Trees of Thika, about growing up in Kenya on “a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie.” |
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 Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) On this day in 1865 Mark Twain published “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog.” Although the story was an old chestnut, one which Twain first heard from fellow prospectors around a mining camp stove, it gave him first fame, the centerpiece for his first book, and the yarn-spinner persona that Twain would mine for his entire career. |
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 Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, the first of his masterpieces, premiered in St. Petersburg. The opening night was such a disaster that by Act Two Chekhov was hiding backstage from the jeering, and by 2 a.m., after hours of walking the streets alone, he was declaring, “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play.” |
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 Elmore Leonard On this day in 1925 Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans. Leonard’s view of his villains and born-to-losers: “. . . I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. . . .” |
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 Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 – 1991) On this day in 1978 the Polish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Singer emigrated from Poland in 1935, but he continued to write mostly in Yiddish, on a forty-three-year-old Yiddish typewriter, of a culture which “sneaks by, smuggles itself amid the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God’s plan for Creation is still at the very beginning….” |
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