In my self-taught, self-directed course, “How to Become a Novelist by age Sixty”, a class which has only one student, I’ve relied upon others to provide me with insight into the world of words and publishing. One of the resources I find indispensable to my education as a writer is Writers Ask, a quarterly published by the editors of Glimmer Train, a short fiction magazine that I also subscribe to. The most recent issue of Writers Ask features interviews with a number of famous authors about the value of would-be fiction writers being ardent readers. All of the pieces are good. One, author Steve Almond’s observation about reading and our youth, is great. Here’s a bit of what Steve has to say:
The generation I am seeing is screen-addicted. Technology has changed so much…(I)nstant messages, cell phones, Blackberries, internet, videos, video games, TV in myriad forms, DVDs…There are all these ways of not being in the present moment, of not being with someone in the room, not being conscious of your surroundings and the fact that you’re a human being on the earth with other human beings…They look to these screens as a way of feeling less lonely and isolated…I think it’s a false fix, but it’s very compelling, and it makes it more and more difficult for people doing the lonely, dogged work of reading.
Reading is not easy. It engages your full imagination and concentration, and as people are raised from the time they’re little kids, every two seconds there’s a new image on TV, I think it is changing the way their brains function. If you took the average human being now and transported them back a hundred years, they would all be clinically ADD. (A) hundred and fifty years ago, people didn’t fight over the TV remote; they fought over the latest installment of Dickens. And it’s not as if our brains have fundamentally changed…We’re still capable of that greater concentration and that greater sense of empathy, and having our imaginations fully engaged and activated by literary art…
((c)2012 Glimmer Train and Steve Almond)
I am going to read Almond’s entire interview to my 14 year old son tonight after soccer practice. Why? Because I am trying to raise my youngest son to be a reader. Not just because I, as a writer, need an audience, but because my love of reading, the passion that I have for good books is so ingrained, so deep in my soul, it’s nearly religious. And, like any good evangelist, I want to share the grace, the peace, the enlightenment that comes from reading the great novelists and short story writers with my youngest son.
Now if I can only find the “off” button on the X-box…
Peace.
Mark
