How to fall in love with fiction

Bookstore shelves and the Internet alike are littered with writing tips. Anyone with any interest in writing fiction has instant access to virtually unlimited resources. Granted, most of them all boil down to the same advice and tricks — write every day, write for yourself, start with a character that wants or needs something, etc. (Personally, I recommend author Chuck Wendig’s site terribleminds.com, and his ebooks on writing, for getting the salient points from a unique and entertaining perspective.)

But what about tips for readers?

I know a lot of folks who used to read fiction, who wished they had more time to read fiction, who love the idea of reading fiction more than the actual practice of it. It’s frankly depressing. Reading fiction fires the imagination — exercises it, keeps it toned like a muscle. And without imagination, there’s no vision, and without vision, there’s no progress. It’s as simple as that.

The culture, however, doesn’t endorse reading fiction (or anything, really) in a big way, and our educational system makes it seem like more than a bit of a trudge.

We need readers. We need them desperately. So screw the writing tips; I don’t need the competition, anyway. If you’re someone who wants to read more, here’s how to fall in love — or back in love — with fiction.

At first, you gotta make the time. Reading for pleasure obviously shouldn’t be something you force yourself to do, but sometimes creating new positive habits requires a bit of willpower. Tell yourself you’re going to spend an hour with a book. Turn off the friggin’ TV. Find someplace comfortable. It may seem alien at first, but when you find a story that really hits you, you’ll be stretching that hour beyond the limits of physics.

Read whatever the hell you want. There’s nothing more insufferable than a literary snob. It’s OK to dislike a certain author or book, but to dismiss an entire genre — or worse, “genre fiction” in general — as beneath your interest is to insult a hell of a lot of people who know a hell of a lot more about fiction than you do, and deny yourself quite a bit of potential satisfaction in the process. Do you love smart, funny contemporary lit, but refuse to read anything anyone has ever called science fiction? Congratulations, you just slept on John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars and Redshirts, as well as about a million other things. Hate comics, but love noir? You missed out on Fell, a triumph of the genre by writer Warren Ellis and artist Ben Templesmith.

Don’t like it? Quit reading it and pick up something else. Some people disagree with me on this. But they’re usually the same people who refuse to read anything not published as a Penguin Classic or by McSweeney’s, so fuck them. DO NOT FEEL OBLIGATED TO FINISH A BOOK YOU DON’T LIKE. It isn’t an assignment.

Look up the words you don’t know. While reading for yourself shouldn’t constitute an assignment, it’s still an ongoing opportunity to learn something — that’s one of the more awesome side effects. Personally, I tend to stop reading and seek out the definition of an unfamiliar word whenever I come across one (there’s usually a phone nearby with more computing power than NASA used for the moon landing), but that’s just me. Some people underline; some people highlight; some people write it down in a journal for later. Whatever works for you, as long as your interest remains piqued.

And, finally: Talk about what you’re reading, to everybody. Spread that shit like a social disease. Not in a “look at me, I’m not just literate, but literary” sort of way, but in a “I stayed up all night to finish it” sort of way. Excitement is infectious, and you’ll be surprised by how many people pull out their phones to save the name of the book that blew your mind.

This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2013.