Ways of Reading

Reading is a strange business. It's not really about waiting for the writer to 'tell' you what the story has to say; it's only when the author is silent that the work will actually 'speak' to its reader. In other words, you, the reader ,will bring something to a good piece of writing, will work with the characters to construct the story. Imagine, when you read, that someone is saying something to you, and that you will be afforded the opportunity to say something back. Even when you don't fully understand what you are reading, you trust that by the end you will have learned.

There are many ways to 'read' a text. On the one hand, we hopefully learn something new, about the characters and about ourselves. We are given knowledge, new facts, or new ways to look at something old. There are also those things that we bring to the text ourselves, from our own experiences, whether the writer meant them to be there or not. This is what is meant by interpretation. Ten people could read the same text and when they come to discuss it, if it is a good piece of work then there will probably be ten different interpretations of it.

The way we read the books we read should help us when we come to write our own. We should think about what it is that we look for in a book, and what we don't like about some books, and consider these when constructing our own works. We should give to our readers what we expect to find in a story or novel.