Ep 104: Learn from the Best - The Book Is Yours When You Write in Its Margins

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King You’ll hear that advice a lot. You want to write? Read a lot and write a lot. Simple as that. But is it that simple? Do we simply open the book, read and enjoy the story or helpful ideas, and automatically absorb the content? Or do we need to read with a plan or a strategy of some kind? Is there a way to take in and retain the content, be inspired by the style, and learn methods to apply to our own work? Is there a writerly way to read? I think there is. So do many others. Let’s start with the content. How do we grasp it, absorb it, retain it? Plagued by Lack of Retention? Someone asked me the other day if I’d read Great Expectations. I had. I read it and remember enjoying it. But I couldn’t recall much detail at all. There's Pip, right? And Miss Havisham sitting around in that ratty old wedding dress? That’s about all I could dredge up. I've read lots of books—I was an English Major, for crying out loud! So I read and wrote response papers about gobs of great literature, countless classics, over the course of my studies—but my recall? After years of academic effort, it feels like only shadowy memories flit across my mind for many titles I was assigned, maybe a scene or an interaction between characters—that tattered old wedding dress of Miss Havisham’s, for example. I wish more works were locked in in their full glory, the plot, themes, and characters remembered more accurately, beginning to end. Make a Book a Part of Yourself: Write in It As a young adult, post-college, I encountered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book written with Charles Van Doren and subtitled “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” Adler wrote: Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. (49) Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself…and yourself a part of it. How do we make it part of ourselves? You heard it. Adler insisted that to “own” a book, we must write in it. Resistance to Marginalia My parents never let me write in a book. The mere thought of marking a page was an abomination. Sacrilege. Verboten. My parents love to read and have strong retention, yet they never marked up books, at least not that I saw. I had been taught what Anne Fadiman calls a “courtly love” of books. They insisted I treat the book itself—the printed book and its pages—with the utmost respect. Leave the pages clean and free of marks for your next reading or for someone else’s. Let them enjoy it without any marginalia to distract them. Our family's books are pristine. In Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, Fadiman explains the attitude of the courtly, Platonic love of books versus a carnal love of them: The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one's own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I'd later erase). But I've been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. (Fadiman 41) In college, I struggled to highlight and underline key passages and information, even though I could plainly see from the used textbooks I purchased that everyone did it. Eventually, I caved and with pencil lightly marked passages I thought I should note for tests and papers. Each time I underlined a passage or circled a word or wrote a comment or drew an arrow, I felt…naughty. Dialogue with Authors But I needed to dialogue with the authors. I needed to enter the conversation. I needed to write in books.