What's with all the reading, Rebekah?

It occurs to me that someone might wonder why I devote so much space to books when that's not, ostensibly, the subject matter of this blog. For all five of you who read it (love you! and sorry to clog your feeds with my multiple posts), I'll explain.

I think that writing is almost unique in the art forms in that it can be done in complete isolation, with no investment. An actor, an animator, a dancer, need to be hired by someone in order to practice their art (that seems like such a vulnerable position, to me). A musician, a painter, a sculptor, need place and materials in order to practice their art. A writer can use a napkin and a pen, they can write in a bar, at work, at home, they can write in the morning or the evening, they can write whenever and wherever, the only tool a writer needs in order to practice their art is discipline.

It seems to me that is why I meet more aspiring writers than any other kind of artist, and more failed writers, writers who don't write, writers who say they write and then produce a battered sketchbook they've been carrying around for years, writers who tell you the idea they had years ago and are going to "do something with someday."

Writing has also the greatest potential as an art form. Because it's made of nothing, it can be anything. It is in books and literature that we see the most extraordinary ideas, it is in great writing that we see the truly original. And every great movie, every great play, we can look through it to the great writer who conceived it and bore it into the world. It's through literature that we see the greatest, most creative, most lasting explorations of our world, our human consciousness.

I'm terribly interested in artforms that are fundamentally collaborative, in tapping the creativity of disparate individuals and wrestling forth something greater than the sum of it's parts, and yet it is in the mind of the writer, that strange, private, unknowable place, that so many amazing ideas are born and made concrete. So I read to know the writer, and I read to conceive the world.