How Writing Changes Reading

You don’t get to stay an innocent reader forever

Photo by Rhamely on Unsplash

I was that kid who tucked a novel inside a textbook every day and read it during class.

While everyone else was learning math or history or science; I was working my way through the classic literature canon.

I had a goal to read all the greats before graduation, and I did pretty well because reading was almost all I did.

I was able to get away with it because I’m a good test-taker and decent bullshitter.

My college schedule was pretty overwhelming because I worked multiple jobs and held down editor positions at the newspaper. But once in a while I’d descend deep into the library stacks and immerse myself into a novel, not coming back up to the surface until I finished it.

I would then emerge into the sunlight, blinking and reeling from the trip I’d just taken while everyone else was playing hacky sack on the quad and having no idea my mind had just been blown. (It was the 80s.)

That version of reading is gone now.

Writing Doesn’t Just Change Reading. It Replaces It.

I can no longer just lose myself in a book in quite the same way, because some part of me — the writer and editor part — is judging everything. I’m looking at the plot, the characters, the pacing, the word choices and everything else.

The spell never fully holds.

Why Every Creative Field Works This Way

It’s not just writing. It’s how expertise works.

I think it’s the same in all arts. My husband, who has a recording studio in our attic, listens to music very differently from how I do. I’m musically inept, so I hear … a song. He hears the individual instruments and the editing choices.

For chefs, I imagine taking a bite of a new dish means deconstructing it.

Architects evaluate buildings.

Once you understand how something is made, you stop experiencing it the way you did before.

The Tradeoff Every Writer Makes

Almost every writer starts as a reader who loved books enough to want to create one.

If you’re reading this, you’re either already writing or thinking about it. And that’s a good thing.

I just want to warn you — if it’s not already too late! — that there’s a tradeoff. Once you look behind the curtain (because I am sure this applies to actors, too!) you can never be just a happy audience member again.

That’s the exchange, and it’s not reversible.

Why Writing is Harder But More Meaningful

Most people who say they want to write a book never do. It’s hard, slow, often frustrating work.

Writing books, opinion pieces, essays, news stories and everything else has enriched my life immeasurably.

But still … I think of how I could magically leave science class and enter the brain of a writer who died a century ago, and I’m a little bit sad that I find it harder to do that now.

The compensation, of course, is the faint hope that maybe someday somebody will pick up a fragile, aging copy of one of my books, start reading, and bring me back to life for a few hours.

It is one form of immortality — the idea of leaving something behind that others will someday experience. Do you remember Forrest Fenn, the guy who hid a million-dollar treasure and sent thousands of people on a treasure hunt some years ago? I interviewed him during the treasure hunt, and he told me he had buried countless copies of his biography for people to find long after he was gone.

Fenn also buried brass bells with this inscription: “If you should ever think of me, a thousand years from now, please ring my bell so I will know.”

His brass bells are our books.

I Think the Trade Is Still Worth It

Losing part of the ability to just dive mindlessly into a story is, to me, worth it for the privilege of being a writer.

You lose the ability to disappear quite as completely into a story, but you gain the chance to be the one who creates that disappearance for someone else.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois who has published 21 books, most of them self-published. Subscribe to The Indie Author! My other Substack, Untrickled, is about income inequality. You can also subscribe to me on Medium. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. My most recent nonfiction book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. Tips accepted at Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.



— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.