Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been immers­ing myself in the writ­ing of Samuel Delany these past few weeks.  I started with About Writing rec­om­mended by Nick Mamatas.  About Writing is com­posed of essays, let­ters, and inter­views.  The for­mat is not one I’m used to with “how-​​to” books.  Its top­ics are wide-​​ranging and var­ied, but Delany has yet to fail at impress­ing me with his insights.  I’ve been twit­ter­ing about the book all week.

I can only read non­fic­tion for so long before it wears me out, and I recently fin­ished How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I needed a new novel to read.  Again, I turned to Nick, ask­ing him what novel of Delany’s with which I should start.  He rec­om­mended Dark Reflections, which is not sci­ence fic­tion (the first assess­ment I made).  The syn­op­sis on Amazon didn’t really grab me—books about writ­ers or poets are not usu­ally my cup of tea unless they end up being trans­ported to an alien world or magic king­dom.  Still, Nick has never steered me wrong, so I bought it for the Kindle app and opened it to read just the first few pages.  The next thing I knew, I’d read a 5th of the book.  It is mas­ter­fully written.

An aside; who­ever designed this ebook did a great job. The type­face makes it feel more like a real book than any other ebook I’ve read yet, which is say­ing some­thing, con­sid­er­ing that I’ve read a cou­ple dozen so far on the iPad, and read dozens more before on my old PDA.  Reading on my PDA used to be my pre­ferred way of keep­ing up to date with the Big Three mag­a­zines, actually.

I’m only halfway done with both books, but I can’t stop think­ing about either of them when I’m not read­ing them.  They draw me in every time I find myself with a few moments.  Alternating between the two has started to make me feel like I’m liv­ing inside Delany’s head. It’s an inter­est­ing effect that I’ve only pre­vi­ously achieved by read­ing a series of books by an author in quick succession.

The impact on my writ­ing has been noth­ing short of aston­ish­ing so far.  I’m about 1500 words into the first short story I’ve attempted in a month, and my process is far more delib­er­a­tive than it ever used to be.  For me, writ­ing was about spilling my brain onto the page as rapidly as possible—if I didn’t go quickly, I couldn’t be sure I would cap­ture the entire story in my head, or worse, I would lose inter­est and dis­card it half-​​complete. 

Now, I find myself writ­ing much more slowly, care­fully con­sid­er­ing each word, and visu­ally imag­ing the scene as I write it very care­fully. Notice which details stand out. Looking closer, and seek­ing pre­ci­sion.  The 1500 words I’ve man­aged so far are eas­ily some of the most descrip­tive I’ve writ­ten in some time.

Whether any of this means I’ll actu­ally write a bet­ter story, I have no idea.  But at the very least, it feels like some kind of improve­ment.  It’s some­thing new, any­way.  And lately, I’ve really hun­gered for some­thing new.

Have you read About Writing?  What did you think?  Others have told me that read­ing it has had a sim­i­lar effect on their writing. 

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Tags: about writing, dark reflections, delany, ebooks, My Writing, nick mamatas