He found me in the tables set up in front of the Eastside branch of the public library during one of their sporadic sales. Ben hopped off his skateboard, tucked it under one arm, and ambled up with his oh-so-serious curious puppy look.
“What are you doing?” He leaned over the table to see which books I’d pulled from the boxes set on the table. They were, of course, Romance novels. He wrinkled his nose and looked away.
“I’m buying books.” I snagged a J.D. Robb and passed over a Nora Roberts. If the kid didn’t like it, he could quit asking for writing advice, because this is what I write.
“Should you be doing that?”
“Why not?” I stopped to smile at him.
“Well, what about royalties? I mean, if you don’t buy them new, the author doesn’t get anything, right?”
“This is true. And it does bother me a bit, but I can’t afford to buy all my books new. I read a lot.”
“You do?”
“Don’t you?” I eyed his skateboard. The wheels were nicked and gritted. I doubted he’d cracked a book all summer. “You should.”
“But I want to be a writer, not a reader.”
“I’ve learned more from reading the kind of books I want to write than I have from how-to books. I’ve learned that you can get away with a lot in a prologue or an epilogue – more than what the how to books lead you to think – that long descriptions are boring unless you give them attitude, and that page after page of nothing but dialogue can leave a reader cold. I’ve learned that passive voice can give a book a more realistic feel but only at the cost of boring the reader, and that first person narrative breaks easily.”
The puppy was back as he gave me a slack-jawed, “huh?”
“I guess the important thing is that I’ve learned to read like a writer.”
“That’s different from just reading?” He shifted weight uncomfortably, and glanced toward the street like he had somewhere he should be going, but he wasn’t quite ready to cut and run yet. “Oh, I guess you mean when you read, you think about what a writer is doing.”
“Yes and no. If all you ever do is read for technique then it will ruin you for reading, and it will screw with your ability to test for emotional arcs.”
“Emotional what?”
“Didn’t we talk about emotional arcs before? It has to do with the way a scene makes a reader feel. When I read, I pay attention to how the book feels. It’s like tasting words. I look for the flavor of it, how effective phrases are, what impression a character leaves, that sort of thing. I watch myself read.”
“Huh.” This time he focused on his black, thick-rubber-soled skate shoes, twisting one foot this way then that.
“So, done any writing lately?”
“Um.. well, no. Not really.”
“Just remember, this isn’t something you have to do. It isn’t too late to turn back yet.”
“You’re always saying that,” he grumbled. “Don’t you want me to be a writer?”
“I refuse to take responsibility for the masochistic life you will take on if you decide to be a writer. That business about bleeding your words onto a page isn’t just a joke. It’s one of the hardest, scariest things I’ve ever tried to do.”
“It won’t be that way for me. I love writing.”
I just smiled.
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