It’s unfortunate, but I like being able to pay my bills. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll be able to keep pace without writing as much as I’d like to (need to?) for long. Every day I feel like the other shoe is going to drop. And it’s a long way down.

But it’s not just time that’s constricted me lately. I’m not stuck in my current project – I know where I am and where I’m going, but the words just come out wrong. My brain feels thick and empty.

At least, until tonight. And I know why. I just always forget.

I’ve barely read anything lately. I’m about to move (Tuesday) and so I’ve been putting off going to the library. But a buddy of mine recently convinced me to borrow one of his books, the first in a series he’s been trying to get me to read for months, The Dresden Files – Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

I put it off because, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have an intense distaste for series and universes, especially for those that tend toward the episodic. You won’t hear me change my tune here – I’m only halfway through the book, and though I always force myself to continue through to the end once I’ve started a book, it’s just as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Aside from occasional bits of punnery and humor which have made me chuckle, the book is poor, for the simple reason it’s written with words and not with imagination. There are certain stock phrases that writers tend to use when they are attempting to describe a scene or a character, phrases that work in language but not as visual descriptions. These phrases have become shorthand, shortcuts, for writers, and they betray that the writer is not visualizing the scene while composing it. Rather, the writer is shortcutting straight to words.

The line that gave this realization to me was Butcher’s description of a character named Morgan, a man with “boyish good looks.” A stock phrase, “boyish good looks” doesn’t convey any fresh image in the reader’s mind. It tells me that Butcher wrote the words but did not picture the scene. What exactly are boyish good looks? Yes, if you focus on them, try to dig into the words, you can realize a crude image in your mind’s eye, but more likely you’re trying hard to play devil’s advocate to my assertions, rather than actually being able to claim that “boyish good looks” conveys to you a descriptive and interesting character portrait.

I admit, Storm Front is Butcher’s debut and must be taken as such. But this type of thing conveys to me the type of writer he is, one who begins with a story and dry words, rather than beginning with visualizations of the scenes and images. He doesn’t find “the hole in the paper” as Stephen King’s character Paul Sheldon in his book Misery would say.

However, the critique aside, Butcher has afforded me another reminder of what I’ve known and been told for a long time, that one cannot expect to constantly write without constantly reading. As much as I dislike Butcher’s first novel, after only reading half of the short tome, already the words flow much easier through my fingertips.

Reading is brain fuel for the writer, as if by typing out words on the page, a gastank in the mind is drained with each keystroke. And even by reading words that don’t particularly ignite my interests, the tank in my mind is fuller than it was before I started.

It’s bookfuel. I always forget that. And always remember it again after I get stuck somewhere and remember to just read for awhile before returning to the keyboard.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Bookfuel. Remember it. As for me, I’m returning to Butcher’s cheap newsprint pages. It’s saccharine schlock, but maybe a sugar rush was just what I needed.

-m.