For a long period of my life, I read a chapter of a writing book every morning with my coffee. It was one of the best things I did for myself when I was just getting serious about my writer’s life.  I’m inclined to go back to this practice because it kept me so grounded and fed my writer’s mind without gobbling up my actual writing time. If you’d like to try that practice with me, please do.

My First Three Writing Reads

Eat This Poem: A Literary Feast by Nicole Gullota – Poems and food. . . seriously! Does it get better? In Nicole’s beautiful book, she pairs a poem with a recipe, and it is one of the most scrumptious things – both in terms of language and cuisine – that I have ever read.  It’s so good that I’m beginning to understand why people read cookbooks. If you, like me, use poetry as part of your writing process or if you’d just like to have some great recipes that go with great words, you’ll want to grab this one.

The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir by Dinty W. Moore – Dinty Moore is one of those people I go to when I need good, no-nonsense writing advice, and so I am very excited about his new book. As someone who works with writers for a living, I know that finishing a book is one of the hardest things to do, and so I’m thrilled that Moore’s book is intended to get us all closer to that goal. Oh, and yeah, he’s funny, too.  If you need advice about writing a gripping, powerful novel or memoir and want to laugh, too, get this book.

Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin – In the latest issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Le Guin is interviewed about writing, and she talks about this book a great deal. She says it’s a guide for more advanced writers, so maybe hold off on this one until you’ve been at this a while and need a bigger kick in the pants. But her wisdom on these pages is forthright and powerful. She doesn’t pull punches about writing for the market, but she also holds out a great deal of grace about the challenges of the writing life. If you want to be moved by one of the greatest writing minds living today, you’ll want this one.

Join me?

Are you interested in trying out this practice of a chapter a day with me? Let me know in the comments below. Does a chapter a day sound good? Any books you want to start with?

I’ll check in here from time to time to see how you’re doing.  Here’s to reading about writing, one of my favorite things.

*The links in this post are affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through any of them, I get a small commission. That commission helps me cover the costs of this blog, so thank you.

If I may, I’d like to suggest my writing book Discover Your Writing Self as an option for your reading about writing. It’s made up of 31 lessons about everything from whether you like to use an outline or not to what stops you from finishing a project. I’d love to read your honest review of the book on Amazon or any other book site if you have or do read it. Thanks. 

I still remember reading The Da Vinci Code. I had it on CD, and on my commutes from San Francisco to Stanford, I’d listen to an hour at the beginning and end of each work day.  The pace was unrelenting, with each chapter’s end an uptick in mystery or action, and by the time I was two-third of the way through the book, I was burnt out on the fervor, even as I loved the story line.  I needed a little more air in the text to be able to stay with it.

Why We Need to Give our Readers Breathing Space

When a book – or even a story, poem, or essay – is too intense for too long, most readers will get fatigued. They may find that they simply don’t find that level of constant intensity believe, or they may simply feel the readerly equivalent of the adrenal fatigue we feel when our daily lives our too stressful.

So we need to give them space by modulating the pacing of our work, incorporating moments of respite, and allowing for peaks and ebbs in the intensity and tone of our writing.  These changes and places of adjustment act as literary rest stops for the reader, giving him a space in which to catch his breath and think about the work anew.

Some Ways to Leave Air in our Texts

There are as many ways to give a reader space to breath in a text as there are pieces of writing, but here are a few of my favorites:

• Intersperse comedy with your tragedy or vice versa. Nothing brings the intensity of a tragedy into full relief like good humor. I’m not talking jokes here or self-deprecation necessarily, although those can work. But rather, I’m suggesting we lighten the tone of our darker works with a humorous scene or word play or even a bit of deathbed laughter.
• Build in literary places of respite. Maybe your character has a love of nature that has sustained her through hard times. Build in moments in nature to give her rest while the reader catches a breath, too. Or maybe there are quiet moments in even the hardest memoir – an afternoon listening to music, a day at the amusement park, a perfect dinner before the horrible climax. Give the reader those moments, too, and don’t taint them with the hard that is to come. That’ll show up soon enough.
• Use white space. Just giving the reader more room on the page – smaller paragraphs, more chapter breaks, gaps between hard scenes – can lift the tone of a book a bit.

The goal here is not to alter the overall tone, theme, or purpose of the work, but instead, we are seeking to help our reader have space to move around in our writing so that they can see the full-color version of the vision we are sharing with them.

What pieces of writing do you know that are so unrelenting in their telling that you felt beaten down by them? And which were intense but gave you space to breath?