Step 1: Wake up at 3:42AM with an idea.  Decide not to write it down because your notebook is in the other room and if you go get it, you’ll be too awake to fall asleep again and then you’ll have insomnia.  Convince yourself that it’s OK to go back to sleep without writing the idea down because you’ll remember it in the morning.

Step 2: Don’t remember it in the morning.  Remember just enough to know that you lost a superbly awesome idea.  Beat your head against the wall.

Step 3: Never fear.  Said idea will come back to you at another, even more inopportune moment, like in the shower.  This time you’ll be ready with a notebook.  Write it down.

Step 4: Spend precisely 12.667 days obsessing over how awesome said idea is and how you can’t wait to write it.  (Number of days may vary depending on the awesomeness quotient of the idea.)

Step 5: Sit down in a frenzy and write exactly 613 words (give or take), exploring said idea.  Read it over.  Decide that you’re the worst writer ever and you’ll never be able to capture such an awesome idea on paper.  Beat your head against the wall.  Again.

Step 6: Read a novel or two, or twelve.  Obsess about how amazing those books are and how unbelievably sucky your writing is and how you might as well do something else with your life, like collecting rare edible fungi.

Step 7: Have a good cry.

Step 8: Read what you wrote again and find one moment, one turn of phrase that’s not completely awful.  Decide you’re not utterly hopeless (just 99% hopeless).  Try again.

Step 9: Fall in love with a character.  Start seeing the world through her eyes and realize you kind of like living in her head.  Decide you’ll stay a while.

Step 10: Stop obsessing about the idea and start obsessing about your character.  Make long character bios for her and all her family and friends (even if her family and friends have nothing to do with the story in the first place).  Write outlines, mind maps, charts, whatever it takes to keep your ideas straight.  Sleep with your notebook under your pillow.

Step 11: Practice some stealth writing.  Hide in a dark corner of a coffee shop and write.  Jot down ideas while riding the subway.  Talk to yourself.  Listen to the voices in your head.  Write down everything and don’t look back.

Step 12: Repeat Step 11 and keep moving forward until you get to the end of the story.  When you hit a wall, remind yourself why you fell in love with this character and this story in the first place.  When all else fails, ask your muse to send you strength to carry on.

Step 13: Carry on.

This post is part of the “What’s Your Process?” Blogfest, hosted by Shallee McArthur.

There’s a lot of research out there on reading and how people learn to read.  Scientists use fancy terms like “sub-lexical” and “phonemic awareness” to talk about how readers give meaning to and make sense of the little black squiggles on a page.  Essentially the research boils down to this:

Scientists use their big scientific words to explain the whole “learning to read” part, but what happens when readers get to the “reading to learn” stage?  Is that all there is?  Is that as good as it gets?

I don’t think so.

The way I see it, there are lots of different ways you can “read to learn” and it all depends on what you want to get out of the thing you’re reading.  Here’s my take on the stages of reading that happen once you’re “reading to learn.”

The Collector:  This reader collects clues and information from the text.  She reads with a pen in one hand and a highlighter in the other.  She underlines a lot.  She makes careful notes in the margin and copious outlines.  For her, language is a means to an end; it is simply a way for a book to convey valuable information.  Boring textbooks tend to bring out the Collector-Reader in many of us, mostly because underlining helps keep us awake.

The Interpreter:  This reader is constantly asking “what does it mean?”  He wants to know exactly what the author was trying to say with each phrase, each sentence.  This quest becomes all the more urgent if the author is no longer alive and therefore cannot be asked directly.  The interpreter believes in the infallibility of literature: that if Shakespeare put a comma in that precise spot he must have done it on purpose and therefore it has to mean something.  Just as Freud believed there are no accidents in life and all actions stem from a deeper meaning, the Interpreter-Reader is certain that there are no accidents in literature and if the author wrote it that way, then there has to be a reason.

The Revolutionary:  This reader doesn’t worry about what it all means, because to her it doesn’t matter.  Meaning is relative.  Instead, when she reads something, she wonders “how did the author do that?”  What’s the author’s agenda and what slight-of-hand tricks is he using to pull it off?  Writers are almost always in this category because they know that when authors write something, they’re just trying to get a reaction or response from the reader.  Writers know this because they do it all the time themselves.

The Revolutionary realizes that by putting words on a page, the author is trying to shape the reader’s interpretation of those words.  Whenever an author chooses one word over another and puts that word down on the page, he is making a decision that will shape or manipulate the reader’s response.  The moment a reader recognizes that this is happening, he or she can decide whether or not they will allow themselves to be manipulated.  It’s just like realizing that televised news broadcasts are not objective, but have specific agendas; once you recognize that, you can see past it and look for the actual information.

More importantly, though, writers know that when look under the hood to figure out how a piece of writing works, you’re not too far from learning to build an engine from scratch.  After all, the moment you ask: “how did the author do that?” you’re just a half-breath away from asking: “how can I do it?”  And that’s what writing’s all about.

This past December, a new hashtag took twitter by storm.  The concept is simple, people just state the reason why they read and add #whyiread, all in 140 characters or fewer.  Check it out!  It can be quite inspiring.

As for why I read, there are almost too many reasons to list.  Here are the most important ones:

1)  Words are delicious.  No matter what mood you’re in, there’s always something you can read that suits perfectly.  In the mood for something dark and decadent?  Try a Gothic romance.  Or what about a light, fluffy souffle made of humor essays?  Yum.  Oh and guess what?  No calories!

2)  Hours of entertainment.  A paperback costs about as much as a movie ticket (at least that’s the case in NYC), yet a book can give me many more hours of entertainment than I can get at a movie.  And if you like the movie and want to see it again, you have to buy another ticket.  Not so with a book.

3)  Travel the world from the comfort of your couch.  You start with airfare and hotel-stays.  Throw in all the hassles–airport security, the airline loses your luggage, your flight gets re-routed because of a snow storm–and before you know it, you need a vacation from your vacation.

4)  Let’s Pretend.  This is my favorite reason, by far.  When I read a book, I can be inside a character’s mind.  For a brief few hours, I’m transported to a different world and I become a different person.  I can try out different lives that I’d never be in real life.

What about you?  Why do you read?

So it turns out that the collaborative project for Fridays is not ready to be unveiled just yet.  All I can say is that it’s going to be super-awesome!  Anyway, I’m excited and sad that I can’t tell you all about it today, but never fear.  All will be revealed soon enough.

In the meantime, have a kitteh.  Or two.  Or more.