Read 20-30 books by the end of the school year (accompanied with their own individual book reports, duh). That was a recurring goal during my elementary and middle school days. For some, this was a challenge. For others, it was a walk in the park. Being an only child with a protective, single parent, AND not being allowed to watch TV or play video games (except on the weekends, whenever I visited my dad, or when I was home alone), reading was honestly the most fun I could have consistently.

Once I hit high school, it turned into We are going to read this book because it’s a classic in literature. That’s when we dissected the book down to it’s core. The symbolisms, meanings, imagery, motives, reasonings, writing style, vocabulary, sentence structure, and overall vibe of the story was put under the magnifying glass as we tried to understand everything the author has laid out infront of us.

Josh… We don’t want to hear your lifestory and why are you even talking about reading when you titled this post “Writing Skills”… Where are you going with this?

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King

I was reminded of this quote today and it got me thinking about all of this. Let’s continue…

Let me be honest with you. High school was the time I learned about Sparknotes. Not having to read a whole book that I wasn’t interested in and knowing all the concepts being asked at a fraction of the time/effort? Sign me up please! I can gurantee that I wasn’t the only one! But this wasn’t good because this was the exact moment in time when I stopped reading for fun. Actually, this was the time when I stopped reading entirely. I haven’t picked up a proper book “just ’cause” since (almost 11 years now)…

Dang, that’s a long time to not read but are we getting to the point Josh? You really are embracing your “Rambling” side…

Ok, ok! Here’s the point…

I’mma be as “blunt” as Stephen King… I’ve always sucked at writing. Doesn’t matter how much I’ve read. Doesn’t matter the teaching I’ve gone through over the years. It’s difficult for me to express myself through the written word. It takes me forever to begin. Even after I get started, I don’t know how to keep writing to any sort of meaningful length. It took me literally 11 hours today to get to this point, and if you actually saw how I managed to manifest all of this, you’d probably cringe.

Now why I talked about reading for the first half of this post is this. A writer who doesn’t read is like a musician who doesn’t listen to music or a filmmaker who doesn’t watch films. Which makes sense. You can’t really be expected to do something well without first experiencing what made past work good to begin with.

Then I’m reminded of what everyone says about pretty much anything:

Practice makes perfect

It’s absolutely true. The more you work on something, the better you’re bound to get at it. Wanna get better at cooking? Cook more. Wanna get better at an instrument? Play that instrument more. Wanna get better at writing? Obviously, you gotta write more! And as we’ve learned from above, we gotta experience/understand all the past good work if we want to improve ourselves.

That’s my goal with this blog… To improve upon my writing skills, and in doing so, my ability to communicate will improve, my ability to express myself will improve, my passion for reading will be reignited (because if I truly want to improve in writing, reading is pretty much a necessity).

This begs the question, how much do you read? Let me know and feel free to recommend any books you’ve enjoyed over the years.