A Quote by Amy King
I do write about thinkers. And that's what I love about reading. My favorite books, the ones that made me sit there for days, weeks, months, years, and pop back into my head - they make me think a lot.
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One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places... But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can't whack you upside it.
But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep.
No strict schedule, but I write nearly daily in my journal. Sometimes I go back and pull out things to give to my characters and my settings in books that I write. But the books themselves are not scheduled. I work on a book when it comes to me, usually about one a year. I spend a lot of time working on it in my head. But getting it published is another matter. So, I have a lot of unpublished manuscripts.
I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.
My father always says, ‘Never trust anyone who has a TV bigger than their bookshelf.’ So I make sure I read. Back at home, I just put up a massive bookcase and asked everyone I know and love to help me fill it with their favorite books. It’s been quite nice because I’ve learned a lot about my friends and family from what they’ve been giving me. A book says a lot about a person.
To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.
I have made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of every year. I usually devote to this reading the first hour after I rise every morning. As, including the Apocrypha, it contains about fourteen hundred chapters, and as I meet with occasional interruptions, when this reading is for single days, and sometimes for weeks, or even months, suspended, my rule is to read five chapters every morning, which leaves an allowance of about one-forth of the time for such interruptions.
The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?"
I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.
I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.
Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.
I try to write a lot and my process is kind of back and forth. I procrastinate a lot so when I do sit down to write, I'm pretty lazy at it. And it's such a frustrating thing sometimes - writing - when you don't do it all the time, you get that thing in your head that you have nothing to talk about and you can't write songs.
Fiction allows for moral questioning, but through the back door. Personally, I like books that make you think - books you're still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say "Read this, so we can talk about it."
If you don't have a plan, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, months turn into years, and before you know it you're looking back saying, I should've had a plan.
I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?
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