Mike Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "dostoyevsky"
Comfort Zone, Twilight Zone
One of the best steps I've ever taken, for growth not only as a writer but a human being, was to set foot outside my intellectual comfort zone. This may sound an obvious necessity to veterans, but it's not easy to recognize as a greenhorn, no matter your age. Even writers who've been scribbling for a while may be resistant to it. In considering Twain's famous remark of a classic being a book we all want to have read but don't want to read, I feel his observation can be expanded to encompass all works that challenge not just our minds but our tastes -- for we don't know our tastes until we discover them. And we all know the rewards such discoveries can provide.
For the four or five years after blindly whipping out the first draft of a first novel no one on this Earth shall hopefully ever remember or see again (including me), I formed my reading lists mostly from the popular fiction shelves. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Mario Puzo and more Stephen King all went down my gullet and the stagnancy of my writing -- in style, voice and originality -- reflected that. And for those wondering: literature in my high school was in short supply, and I never attended a formal university. Such situations, unfortunate as they may sound to some, have made my independent explorations far more nourishing and memorable.
You might smell a snob here, but rest assured: this isn't a condemnation of popular writers so much as it is a warning about only swimming laps in one's pool and ignoring the ocean that's right there. Sure it's wide and intimidating, and you might swallow a mouthful of shit, but it's an experience, it's new, it's rattling. In my own case, I was frankly insecure about my own intellectual abilities. I understood King and Koontz -- the likes of Joyce and Kafka and Cervantes were for the cerebral and scholastic. Then one evening I cracked open Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment (a violent act in and of itself considering it was my mother's decrepit copy, over sixty years old) and within thirty or so pages I found myself saying, on a perhaps less conscious level, "I get it. I get it!"
Not only did my subsequent writing vastly improve, but so did my self-trust, self-confidence and my basic cognition -- essentially, my ability to think, reason and speak extemporaneously with more complexity. Most crucial, however, is that I've come to realize the integral role literature has played, and continues to play, in my development as a person. I notice nowadays in choosing a book that my criteria is not only, "What enjoyment can I get out of this?" but, "What wisdom can I get out of this?" The latter makes the former even more, well, enjoyable.
For the four or five years after blindly whipping out the first draft of a first novel no one on this Earth shall hopefully ever remember or see again (including me), I formed my reading lists mostly from the popular fiction shelves. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Mario Puzo and more Stephen King all went down my gullet and the stagnancy of my writing -- in style, voice and originality -- reflected that. And for those wondering: literature in my high school was in short supply, and I never attended a formal university. Such situations, unfortunate as they may sound to some, have made my independent explorations far more nourishing and memorable.
You might smell a snob here, but rest assured: this isn't a condemnation of popular writers so much as it is a warning about only swimming laps in one's pool and ignoring the ocean that's right there. Sure it's wide and intimidating, and you might swallow a mouthful of shit, but it's an experience, it's new, it's rattling. In my own case, I was frankly insecure about my own intellectual abilities. I understood King and Koontz -- the likes of Joyce and Kafka and Cervantes were for the cerebral and scholastic. Then one evening I cracked open Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment (a violent act in and of itself considering it was my mother's decrepit copy, over sixty years old) and within thirty or so pages I found myself saying, on a perhaps less conscious level, "I get it. I get it!"
Not only did my subsequent writing vastly improve, but so did my self-trust, self-confidence and my basic cognition -- essentially, my ability to think, reason and speak extemporaneously with more complexity. Most crucial, however, is that I've come to realize the integral role literature has played, and continues to play, in my development as a person. I notice nowadays in choosing a book that my criteria is not only, "What enjoyment can I get out of this?" but, "What wisdom can I get out of this?" The latter makes the former even more, well, enjoyable.
