On two ways of reading
I remember the first time I thought about a text beyond the literal meaning of the words on the page. I was in second grade, and I was given the box set of The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and loved it, but at a key part, was struck by the similarity to a story I already knew. “Mom,” I said, “I think Aslan is like Jesus.” I was so thrilled by making this connection, it was as if I knew the Deep Magic myself.
And thus was born an eventual PhD in English Literature.
Levity aside, for most of my early reading life, when I wasn’t reading for pleasure, I was reading like a scholar – like someone who looks for themes and patterns and archetypes and deeper meanings. It did, sometimes, feel like we were reading too closely, looking for things that weren’t there. I remember a joke with friends in high school, that sometimes a crow with an arrow it its mouth was just a crow with an arrow in its mouth. But also, on the whole, I liked that sort of reading, one that treated the text as a treasure hunt, or a puzzle. One that let me chase down allusions and cross-references, and what we now call Easter eggs that the author might have left for an observant reader. I liked the idea that I could learn all the secrets, could know all the possible hidden meanings.
The way I read changed when I decided to write. It’s not that I no longer thought that there were secrets, themes, allusions, references in texts. I knew there were – I put them in on purpose myself! But the idea that everything was deliberate – that was gone. I remember inviting another writer friend to guest lecture a class that I was teaching, and a student began a long, involved question on the meaning of yellow in the text, and the writer stopped the student: “There’s a lot of yellow in that book because I really like the color yellow.”
Now, I believe that reading is a dialogue, not a monologue, and that the reader brings their own self, their own curiosity, their own way of reading and thinking to the text as well, and that there certainly could have potentially been some sort of literary analysis of the meaning of the color yellow in that writer’s book that could have been very intelligent and thought-provoking. That could even have been true, in the sense of being backed up by evidence from the text. But also, sometimes the writer just likes the color, and that is also a true interpretation. (And, perhaps even the more true one, if a teacher has asked, “what did the writer mean by this?”)
But really, what changed in me was that as a writer, especially as a beginning writer, I was always analyzing the how something was done. I was looking backstage, behind the curtain, trying to see the mess levers that made the writer into the wizard, the smoke and mirrors that created the illusion on the page.
In terms of developing my craft, this was a good and useful way to read! I had never formally studied writing as writing (in terms of how to do it, not what it means) until I went to the workshop that made me certain that writing was what I wanted to do. So at the beginning, I was absorbing like a sponge. In terms of my enjoyment of reading, well, it got old in a hurry. I felt like reading was work all of the time, because I couldn’t turn off the writer part of my brain in the way that I could turn off (or at least lower the intensity of) the academic, analytical part of my reading brain. The only thing that worked to return me to my solely-reading self was a book so spectacular that it made it impossible for that over-thinking writer brain to take over, which was extremely rare.
Of course, this has changed, too. As I have built my own skills as a writer, I am less constantly always looking at what others are doing. Not that I never pick up a book because I remember the author doing a really interesting thing that I want to study – I still do. But I am more likely to analyze on purpose, rather than by default. Though, my history as a reader does suggest that I was always going to be analytical in my writing, at least at some level, that there has always been a pleasure for me in figuring out what makes a text tick, and in digging down to find the Deep Magic in a story.