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Welcome to August! This is the month of the year that most resembles my writing process: full of long, empty stretches where it seems like nothing is happening. I know I’ve written about this before, how it can look from the outside as if a writer is just being stagnant, but that’s usually when things are happening under the hood/behind the scenes. Last month, for instance, I finally (finally) finished a draft of a short story I started writing years ago. I queried another agent and researched a bunch more.

And I think I finally figured out which book I’m going to work on writing next. It’s not the one I expected I’d be working on next, but it’s always fun to be surprised.

Why would you write stories if you don’t read them?

August means I’m about to start teaching again. I offer an introductory creative writing class at a local university with a focus on writing science fiction and fantasy. Of all the professional things I do outside of my own writing, this is by far the most fulfilling. (The day job is exactly that.)

I think students are often surprised by how much reading we do. Yes, we write every week (a combination of assignments and free writing prompts), but I assign just as much reading as I do writing, if not more. A comment in my end-of-the-year feedback that stayed with me was a student saying they didn’t “get” the point of all the reading we did during the semester.

I tend to choose short fiction from the last ten to fifteen years or so because I want students to have a feeling for what’s being written now, as opposed to fifty or sixty years ago (though I do slip in one or two of those, if only to provide contrast). I lean toward stories that have been finalists or winners of some of the big awards—Hugos, Nebulas, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, that sort of thing—and I pick stories that I think do something interesting with regard to whatever craft topic we’re focusing on that week.

At the beginning of the semester, I ask a few basic get-to-know-you questions including what the last story or book they read was. Darn if a lot of them don’t struggle with that. Some of them will mention films or games, but words on a page (or screen) sometimes don’t register.

This is not universally the case, obviously, but it comes up enough that, like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder, why would you want to write stories if you don’t bother reading stories?

I love to cook, but I don’t make meat or chicken dishes because I don’t eat either of them. How am I going to know what I’m doing if I don’t taste the final product, or have previous meat or chicken dishes I’ve enjoyed to compare against what I’ve made?

One of the things I encourage my students to do is to question any received wisdom, including my own. So I try to avoid saying you have to do this or if you want to write, you need to develop these techniques. Reading is the thing that made me want to write, and it’s the thing that keeps me wanting to write now. I read someone else’s story and sometimes I find a key that unlocks a way to write the story I’m trying to tell. Or one of them, at least.

Maybe that’s a question I should ask them.

But no rules. No you have to do this or you have to read this much or you can’t write [insert genre here] without reading these books. But I feel so strongly that reading, and reading a lot, has made me a better writer. Maybe not a good writer, but better than I would have been otherwise.

And that’s all for now. See you next month!