Creative Reading 201

Author Tracy Hickman (best known for the Dragon Lance books) gave a speech tonight as part of the BYU writers conference I've been attending this week. His words struck me so powerfully that I want to share the message with you as well as my thoughts on what this means for me and my writing.

Creative Reading 201:
An exploration of the reader as the author's partner in creation.

Story=meaning

No book lives until it is read. The reader partners in the experience in creating the written word. How that works is that the writer places symbols on a piece of paper, and the reader later comes along and interprets those symbols and make them come to life.

The meaningful experience in all literature takes place in the white space between the words. Minds connect the dots and fill in the blanks. It is what the reader interprets the words to mean, how they are personal, that creates a meaningful experience.

Literature is an art form where the final performance takes place while the original artist is not present. He cited an example from Stephen King's book On Writing. The experience of reading is like time travel back to when the author sat down at his desk and wrote it. They are experiencing the same things in one moment, even though those moments may be separated by years from when the author first wrote the book.

*It does not matter if you are published. Anyone can be published by ordering a copy of their book off Lulu. What matters is that you are read. It matters that your words come to life. Your words are dead until they are picked up by someone else.

We all read the same words, but what we bring to the story from our own experience makes it unique. It is the reader not the writer who creates the meaningful experience of the written word.

The only constant in the world is change. We're always moving forward, backward, or staying stagnant, but we are always moving in a direction. If we aren't moving forward, we are regressing and losing some of the knowledge we had. What we experience while reading a book cannot but help us change.

*Creation is more than knowing. It's doing something with what you know to change the world.

Tracy then shared a story about a soldier in Afghanistan who had read the Dragon Lance books and loved them. He took them with him as he was stationed so far from home. One day while on duty, he was shot in the back. The young soldier thought in that instant of what one character in the books would have done and he decided to act accordingly. Standing up even though his back was shattered, he warned his comrades and saved twelve lives that day.

I can't imagine that I'll ever have such a dramatic experience, but it still struck me that writing and books and stories can be so powerful when you touch a reader's life with your words.

Now for what this means to me. Today I was having a little mini crisis with my writing. Even though I've had close to 75 glowing comments from people who've read the first few chapters and loved the voice, and even though I've had two people read the whole thing and tell me they absolutely loved it, I started to doubt myself. I won't go into the reasons why, but let's just say I was feeling really down about my ability to write a book that I can actually get published.

And then I sat down to listen to Tracy speak, and I realized how selfish I was being. I was thinking of myself as the writer and not thinking of the reader. All I have to do is my very best with this book, and then I hand it over to the reader who will take that and create. There is something so incredibly powerful about that.

Really, that's why I started writing. I wanted to make a difference in people's lives—even if for just one person. I wanted to touch them, however briefly. But in all the hustle and bustle of "getting published" I forgot that.

So I am incredibly grateful for the lesson I learned tonight: I'm not in this by myself. It's a partnership I have with the readers. It doesn't matter if only two people ever read my whole book as long as it affects them, even if only for the entertainment value.

I don't know that I'll ever affect anyone's life so powerfully that they chose to save others' lives at risk to their own, but I hope that someone somewhere is better because of reading something that I write.