Larry M. Coleman

Would you trust a mechanic to fix your car who has only ever worked on one kind of car? Would you go to a doctor who has only treated one patient over and over? Would you want me as your pilot if I’d only flown one plane?

Of course not. But there are a lot of people who think reading other authors will dull their voice or “unduly influence” them, whatever that means. Not reading other authors is like never leaving your hometown because traveling might be a bad influence or refusing to learn a foreign language because English has got it all already.

Don’t be afraid to read others: actively seek it out. On my desk, stacked up and patiently waiting their turn to be read, are these two stacks of books:

If I wanted to remain a “pure” writer, true and beholden only to myself, this is an absolutely horrible way to go about it. You can see the disapproval on my cat Chloe’s (who only answers to “Pitty”) face in the background. As I said in my last post, I already have a distinctive writing voice. Reading these refines and enhances it, it doesn’t remove or deface it.

The nonfiction books are either for research (Cults by Max Cutler, The Big Roads by Earl Swift, the mythology books) or personal interest, so there’s no need to go into them. But here are the fiction works in those piles:

• Two books, Stone Blind and A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes (There’s nothing particularly special about those two; I just found out about her and those happened to be the two my library had.)
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• A Pirate Looks at Fifty by Jimmy Buffet sitting on top of Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (How’s that for a combination?)
• Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
• A Void by Georges Perec (That’s the English translation of the French novel that was written without the letter ‘e.’)
• The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
• Band of Brothers by Ernest K. Gann (Plucked off the shelf without even opening it because Gann wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Fate is the Hunter, and I had no idea he’d ever written fiction.)
• Hot Pursuit by Stuart Woods (I’ve never read anything by him because thrillers aren’t a genre I particularly care for, but occasionally I read a book precisely because it’s not my normal genre. Besides, I wanted to see why he has no less than three entire shelves of his books at my library. The reason I picked this particular one is for its cover: the airliner on the cover is exactly the plane I fly at work.)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (I read this book in school and loved it, but this one is an actual graphic novel version. I’ve never read a single graphic novel. Never wanted to, either. But I ended up walking out of the library with not one, but two, because I grabbed one of Neil Gaiman’s books on Norse mythology, too.)

That’s an entire river of good writing to drink from, and that’s just the library “to-read” stack. To not take a cup or a gallon from it would be foolish, and if a few drops of each of them never dries off of my writing soul, that’s a good thing. They’re good company to be in and good friends to keep.

If you want to see the books I have read (at least from 2016, when I actually started tracking them), here’s my Goodreads bookshelf:

I’m one book shy of 500 so far. If you’re reading this while The Woman in Me by Britney Spears is still on the list, please understand that sometimes a writer’s research isn’t pretty. (No, seriously, it was a research read. I’m thinking of breaking the string of books from the same set of characters and writing a fictional biography of a French pop singer who was briefly the Britney Spears of France. I needed to know why Spears imploded, but her book did an unimpressive job of getting into it.)

Writing is a conversation you have with the present. Reading is a conversation the past has with you. Don’t be afraid to listen to both.