Reading Cereal Boxes: By Rob Williams

I promise I'll continue my post about meeting with my agent and what is going on with the book.

Briefly, yes-- I'm working on turning it into a novel -- my short term goal (for this month) is to do an acceptable draft by using what I already have and then show it to the agent.

In the meantime, however, here is an essay on the ‘Writer as Reader’ by one of my favorite writers:
John Dufresne
(oh he of the amazing short story collection "Johnny Too Bad")


Excerpt:

The Writer Reads
by John Dufresne

“ . . . how could you write about anything without wondering if it were true?  I mean you’d be describing a bird in the garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” 
–Gore Vidal

(Quoting Christopher Isherwood)

            A fiction writer has to read everything from Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books to the backs of cereal boxes.  (My own cereal box says, “Tiny dark specks which are natural to corn are occasionally found in this product.  They are not harmful in any way, and will not affect the taste or texture of this product.”  I’m given a phone number to call if I’m anxious and told to “Please retain box when calling.”)  The writer’s problem, and opportunity, is knowing the world.  That’s why we can never have enough reference books.  Reference books supply the facts we need, and then, as Kenneth Clark put it, “Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.”  How nice when writing your story to reach over to a volume on the shelf–always keep your books near the writing desk–and learn that, yes, they did indeed have birds in the fourth century, and the one I’m thinking of now is this one on page 187, the song sparrow.  Christopher Isherwood


This is an essay that I've read many times and just love it. I find I'm always reading. Reading signs on the subway, flyers on street corners, reading shampoo bottles (over and over in every morning), food ingredients, magazines, newspaper, and, of course, books.

Re: Dufresne's essay-- above my desk I have: Webster's New World College Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, the Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary, and, close at hand I have The Ultimate Visual Dictionary
(good for looking up things like a 'kave'--an oar pivot on a Viking Rowing Boat)  and the 1902 Edition of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue
(which is now on CD Rom! ...there was a time, when I was about 8 or 9, that I thought you could still order from it...)

Right now (per my agent's suggestion) I’m reading: ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ curiousincident