Ian Wilson's Blog: Stories are Everywhere - Posts Tagged "reading"

There are basically two kinds of people in the world; those who read books from a young age, and those who don't (read in a Clint Eastwood voice). I was the latter. Yes, it's strange to admit as a writer, I was a non-reader as a lad.
You see, I was very high energy as a kid. It was a chore for my mother to get me to sit still for any length of time. Had I not been homeschooled, there is an 89% chance I would have been pronounced ADHD (bear in mind that all statistics mentioned in any and all blogs of mine are of a purely speculative nature). Learning to read meant I had to sit still. It took time away from doing things that I actually liked, like drawing, playing with legos, or sticks, or amphibians. My mother had to practically tie me down to get me to read or write anything. Not to mention the reading curricula available to homeschooling families at the time were distressingly dull and old fashioned.
Basically, in order for a book to hold my attention, it had to have some action to it. This is still mostly true. I can't tell you the number of books I've never finished simply because I got bored. The books that did fascinate me as a young kid were The Hobbit, Norse Myths, Greek Myths (highly edited ones, if you know where I'm going) and comics like Tintin. I'll never forget the first time they gave me a Tintin book. I devoured it, and I never devour books. Granted it was a comic, but this was still a feat if you'd known me as a boy.
The people that don't read early on kind of get a bad rap, if you ask me. The ones that read at the age of three or something are the ones that are remembered (partly because that's remarkable). Though I must admit, I sometimes get the impression that early readers look down on us late readers. Many writers, I might even say most writers, boast of having read early, so non-readers like myself are sort of like outsiders. I get it. I don't fit the norm for an author. But I'm here to tell you late-readers out there, it's OK. It's OK that you preferred movies to books when you were younger. It's OK that you still take a lot of time to read stuff. This is all OK. Because guess what? Some of the best stories were not written down until long after they were first told. Telling stories is a vital part of human experience; writing them down is a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.