On Writing was a book I accidentally came across in a library catalogue and deliberately got out on loan.
On Writing
by Charles Bukowski
I loved this book. It talked about writing however you want. Including mentions of being an author who doesn’t care about spelling.
I admire the pre-internet ability to have written and sent off works, with no personal copy of them. That mind boggles me a bit. What if I’m derivative and write the same thing over and over again but I don’t have a copy and I don’t know? Or I don’t know if I’m learning or improving? I’m not sure I could do it.
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I loved this book, at the start.
The problem is, I identified with a lot of it. It was like what twitter would have been if it had existed in the 40s-60s. The problem with identifying with a lot of it was that I don’t read to hear what I already think. I stopped reading the book. In the truest sense, this was a “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup. Perhaps if I knew the author’s works it would have meant more and I would have stuck with it when I started identifying way too much with it.
Do you stop reading books if you over-identify with them?
