Righting the Wrong Reading led to more Writing!

I have enjoyed writing for a very long time, and I was even writing full length plays back when I was at school. Ok, looking back on what I was writing back then it was pretty awful...but I had yet to go through the other fifteen years or so of experience I now have. So I have forgiven myself.

But what amazes me most it just how much I learnt to hate reading, and that all happened at university. I loved the reading I had to do for my A-Levels, and I must credit that to the excellent teachers I had. I even learnt to really "get" Shakespeare and genuinely enjoy his plays. It is no surprise that may favourite tragedy, Hamlet, was one such text. I was also introduced to Solzhenitsyn with his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", the joys of Orwell in Animal Farm, the joy of Maya Angelou, the tribulations of One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest... and many more treasures I am listing all from memory.

I was taught by passionate teachers who also taught me to enjoy the acamedic, genuinely intelligent side of my thinking. I loved the theory on my Media Studies A Level as much as the practical side, and in my own years as a teacher I drew many theoretical ideas from them. As a Drama Specialist I clearly took inspiration from my Drama teachers, but also from my Dance teacher - all who became more as colleagues and fellow professionals as I got older.

Even more off-piste, one might think, is how much I loved my A Level in Maths - and recently had great fun testing that knowledge for the first time in may years with a friend on Facebook as we both felt the need to not only enjoy a fun little moving diagram, but also to mathematically prove and explain it! None of that could have happened if I had not held such fond memories of maths, thanks to enthusiastic and engaging teachers.

So what happened? University happened. It wasn't that the work was "hard" - not at all. In fact, it was too easy in many, many cases. I had been challenged far more between 16-18 than I ever was between 18 and 21. I could easily knock together essays in about 6 hours and still get 2:2 or 2:1, and I knew well enough that with a subject like Theatre Studies a 1st was awarded to very, very few people, and objectivity was not the forte of many an assessment. (That is all I will say on that topic!).

Above all, I think the main problem was that I had to read so much utter bullshit. So much self-important academic tripe that would spend pages or chapters saying something that was blindingly obvious in the most pointlessly complicated of ways. Besides an excellent lecturer in Ancient Greek stuff, a superb practiioner in Commuity Theatre, and some of the best professionals in the Drama Education department (where I spent most of my final year), most of my time was spent trawling through drivel that was so obscurely written that I could literally read an entire page and be unable to recall anything I had actually retained from it. Not because it was difficult, but because it was long winded, self-important to the point of soul-crushing. It was as if the writer was trying to be as clever-sounding about their topic as possible so that one would remember more who had written something than what they were writing about. And worse still - I had to quote these people in order to prove I understood the learning.

I was doing all the wrong reading, and doing it for the wrong reasons.

But I played the game and got a comfortable 2:1, which is significant enough when one "reads" at The University of Warwick. It's is funny telling people my degree, in fact: watching their face sink as I say "Theatre", only to perk up again when I mention "Warwick"! However, the simple truth is that one of the main things I learnt at University was...to hate reading. ANY reading. Besides reading scripts I was working on, I don't think I read very much at all for pleasure (besides Roald Dahl's short stories - they are excellent!) for years. And I really do mean a good, long, 9 or 10 years. (Bugger...that's a decade!) Then I stumbled across a book I had picked up randomly for some multibuy reason and left in a box. It was Deadline by Simon Kernick.

And BANG! I was hooked. I was literally swept away by the pace and excitement that I had never read before. I was reading at a pace, and non-stop for hours on end like never before. Soon enough I was working through his collection, often walking past the cinema and into the bookshop on the logic that I could get hour more fun out of a book than in an over priced cinema filled with people I didn't want to share space with (unless going to the Electric CInema, Birmingham - classy cinema!). Then, after Kernick came Mark Billingham's books, MIchael Robotham, Lisa Ballantyne's amazing debut novel, Adam Creed, and so on.

I was hooked on crime and thrillers and the pace and deaths and chases and plot-twists and surprises and characters and the occasional comedy. I was hooked on being able to escape into the world of a book so completely that I was going to bed and extra hour or two early to get reading time each day or else faced staying up to the early hours. I felt like a child again and had to plead with myself for "just 10 more minutes"..."no, you have work in the morning"...

And in the spirit of cause and effect...part of this interest came from research I was doing for my play, No Smoke. But the knock on from that came a need to read more. I was reaad AND writing. And after a year of reading a huge number of novels by my standards, I was wondering about attempting a novel (To Die For). I shall not go into too much detail about the origins and journey of writing To Die For yet as that is a topic for another day.

Instead this post it is more about how finding a passion for reading again is what finally spurred me onto writing my first novel. Many years experience of writing plays and working on shows had honed my interest and technique in telling a story. Finally, I wanted to communicate story through a novel of my own. Part of me wonders just how necessary that black time in reading really was. Why does academic writing have to be such...well...pretentious bollocks? It makes for terrible reading, and makes learning a painful and "necessary-if-only-to-pass" task,

So it became necessary for me to lose my passion and shake off that wrong reading. It was only after finding the right reading for me that I was able to take that step, What is the right reading? Story! A damn good story where it is clear that the writer had put the reader's enjoyment and engagement first, before their own need to demonstrate just how "clever" they are. I learnt to love reaing for the sake of the enjoyment alone...and that inspired me to finally venture into the world of novel writing. Now...let's see how that goes... Check out the opening chapter to "To Die For" here

#NewWriting #ColinWard #MarkBillingham #SimonKernick #MichaelRobotham #Degree #Theatre #Story #Crime #CrimeThriller