A curious thing happens often to a narrator, that he be asked questions about the beginnings of his craft. I say curious, because I imagine they will not ask a carpenter when and why he decided to build its first chair, or a sea captain when he decided to ram his first iceberg.
Instead it seems that the writer must somehow give an account of how he came into this freak. On the one hand the question is flattering because it implies some element of eccentricity in the thing, forcing the other to climb whenever the mirrors to provide a response at least sensible, that there do in fact go through daffodils or worse, for shrinking violet.
The difficulty of the answer lies in a sort of space-time-lag, which generally do not think.
E 'it's pretty obvious, I think, that writing always begins by reading. We fell in love with a certain type of stories and at some point if they are no longer enough, you have the feeling that something is missing: what begins to rise to the idea of \u200b\u200bus add to the pile.
We start therefore always on the reading, and before and the more you before and is more like writing. But the critical issue is: "what" readings? And also, "when"?
Reading as all complex stimuli, which are sensory or intellectual constructs our vision additions and subtractions to the world, but its timing, linked to the evolutionary cycle. "Treasure Island" has a very different impact on our imagination for 10 years, 18 or 25. Reading Kafka at age 16 we start at a later interpretation of the world complex, distressed but also problematic. Doing it at 50 is just an intellectual, as intense as you want but that hardly change a well-established Weltanschauung.
charm but also the drama of writing it is that when you start, actually has already begun a decade earlier . I can write a science fiction novel at 20 to 10 years only if I read "From the Earth to Moon "and 15 Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, etc..
But what if I did? In most cases there's nothing left to do. You can
groped shock therapy, hastily constructed a store base of two to three hundred key works in the genre you choose (perhaps becoming a partner to help, and here perhaps a good school of writing may have some use), but staying alert to not bundle material at random, but respecting a basic hierarchy of value.
Never rely on the books of a newspaper supplement, however: it is perfectly useless to know by heart the complete works of Paulo Coelho If we ignore Borges or Marquez (I it happened with my student). Or read
Moravia but not Tolstoy, but not Pasolini Manzoni, the last witch but not Joyce.
So we need a method, as in all. If for no other reason then to have the pleasure of violating it and do what we please.