It is the strangest thing. Before I started my MFA at SNHU I read about 1-3 books a year and now I am reading 4 books at the same while keeping up with my reading for class. I even bought a Kindle Paperwhite to read books before bed. Had I always been capable of reading this much and I hadn’t known? For example, I am reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Jose Skinner’s Flight and Other Stories, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, and Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter. All of them for very different reasons but all for pleasure. The old adage is true. If you want to learn to write, you must be an avid reader. It’s funny. Before I do any writing of my own for my novel, I make sure to spend at least 30 minutes reading for pleasure. I motivates me and gets me in the mood to write. I think it has had a beneficial effect on my writing. I am never short of ideas or inspiration when I do this.
I am slowly working through Rooney’s catalog and just adore the way she incorporates dialogue into action and description. She does a fabulous job of weaving characters into the plot and vice versus. Her novels are always character centric. My novel started about Carlos and Henry’s relationship and quickly morphed into a story about Carlos and the relationship between his brother David. The romance part of the novel took a step back into the story. It is still important to Carlos’s character development, it’s just that his relationship with David is more important to me. It kind of tints everything Carlos does in the novel. His family is important to him. He can sometimes come off a bit too protective but aren’t all older brothers like that?
Next time, I want to talk more about Ruben and David’s relationship and how they mirror Carlos and Henry’s budding relationship. Until next time, laters gators!