One way to refill the well
I didn’t start reading nonfiction for fun until I was an adult. It was between law school and graduate school, and I was teaching, but it was the first time in my life since I’d started kindergarten that I hadn’t been a student. I missed learning, and I was also starting to consider how much I hadn’t learned about, even in all those years of school.
So I started haunting the nonfiction section at bookstores. I usually grabbed a biography or a memoir (almost always of a woman), or a history. Sometimes a book of science writing or an essay collection. Whatever I was in the mood for that day. There was no pressure to research a particular subject or person or time period, I just wanted to be learning.
It became a way to remind myself how big the world is, and how interesting.
The habit dropped off a bit in grad school, mostly because I was reading so much there that all of my non-school related reading dropped off, but I picked it up again after, and I have kept it up. I’m currently almost done with Catherine Oslter’s biography of Elizabeth Chudleigh, The Duchess Countess – scandalous women in history remain a favorite topic.
It’s also a habit that I’ve learned helps me in my fiction. It’s a bit of a cliché that one of the questions writers get asked most often – “where do you get your ideas from” – is also one of the questions they most hate being asked. “Everywhere!” “The Idea of the Month Club!” “I’ve made a pact with a forest witch. She brings me ideas, I bring her… well, don’t ask.”
But for me, reading broadly, learning about people and places and things and time periods I didn’t previously know about, or learning more deeply about those I did, is part of where I get my ideas from. It’s not usually a one-to-one thing, but I take notes, magpie-like, of things that I can borrow. Of interesting phrasings, or of events that lend themselves to being refolded and polished into fiction. (I often do direct research, too, when I’m writing, but that feels different to me – a way of looking for specific knowledge at a specific time, rather than storing up things for later use.) It’s a way of refilling my creative well.
It's also – and this has felt particularly valuable recently – a way of reminding myself that there has been and is wonder in the world. That things are almost always more complex and nuanced than we first think. That there are smaller stories inside the big ones, and that those are also important, and worth remembering. This kind of reading has become a way of refilling my self.
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