I’m listening to Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Zafon. The language and the idea of the story brings to mind a particular mindset born of an idea I had long ago. Once, I believed that books—story—was an ocean. I believed that the type of stories I read became the water I drank and felt against my skin. In that way I became acclimated to a particular way of being. I learned that I wrote, and on occasion, spoke in the diction of the language I consumed. It occurred to me that writers were always adding stories to the oceans they consume. Few started their own bodies of water and the ones who did we knew, even moreso than the one that made great waves on these established oceans with frothing white crests of acknowledgement.
Reading Zafon is very different from other reading I do so very often. I read him and feel my words impacted by the reading, shifting from the style and character of the stories I often tell. These diversions are always a plus.
ideally I will be able to merge these waters into a new style, a new body of thought and imagination that washes over my readers. I’m hopeful that I can do so, and that it sounds authentic as opposed to borrowed and unreal. Reading is writing. Writing is imitation in its most flattering form. Ones voice is an echo of their experience both in consuming and experiencing. Therefore to expand the boundaries of both is the most useful pathway to understanding and creating good things.