Writers, You’ve Got to Read Some Trash!

Back in college, my first creative writing professor would regularly ask us, “what did you read this week?” And we would invariably respond with variations of reading assignments from different required classes and whatever might currently be atop the bestseller list.

“C’mon, people!” she’d cry out. “You’ve got to read something for fun. You’ve got to read some trash.”

Of course, her version of “trash” meant Anne Rice vampire novels.

What she meant was that, as writers, we need to keep that creativity well-oiled. It’s so easy to fall into a rut, to only read books in our genre, or to read only one type of non-fiction book. She was encouraging us to read-outside-of-our-own-box. She was encouraging us to revisit that joy of reading that made us want to become writers in the first place. She was encouraging us to disappear into story.

I haven’t always lived up to that encouragement.

In 2020–yes, I used that dirty word–it was so easy to forget there were multiple worlds out there, in between the covers of the books on my shelf, where I could lose myself and forget. So, with these posts on Books for Fun, I share what tickles my fancy, stokes my imagination, and whisks me away.

Dead bodies always welcome. Dragons too, but that’s another post.