阅读时间：7分钟

原文链接：

www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/relationship-between-reading-and-writing/

翻译：cyalice

阅读更多的书能使我们成为一位更好的作家吗？答案是肯定的。阅读和写作是同一枚硬币的两面。正如安妮·拉莫特所说，“反之亦然 ——写作使你成为更好的读者。”

当一个人更深刻的敬佩和专注阅读一本书时，就能知道写作有多么难，特别是还要使写作看起来很轻松就难上加难了。你开始以作家的眼光去阅读。你找到了一种全新的方式去探索一位作家是如何用新颖，大胆和原创的方式描绘他或她的观点。

史蒂芬·金，欧内斯特·海明威和大卫·福斯特·华莱士以他们充满智慧的经验和我们分享了阅读和写作关系的看法。

为什么要阅读

在「写作：工艺回忆录」中，斯蒂芬·金解释了为什么阅读对于想写作的人来说是如此重要。

如果你想成为一名作家，你必须做两件事情，比其他人更多地阅读和写作。没有任何捷径和方法绕过我所知道的这两件事情。

我看书很慢，但我通常每年都会读七十八本书，其中的大部分是小说。我不是为了学习写作而读书，我读书只是因为我喜欢阅读。这是我晚上做的，踢在我的蓝色椅子上。同样，我也没有看小说学习小说的艺术，只是因为我喜欢故事。然而，还有一个学习过程。

阅读的真正重要性在于它与写作过程形成了轻松和亲密的关系;凭着作家的作品我们可以来到这位作家的写作国度。不断阅读会把你带到一个你无意识情况下渴望写作的国度（或者是心灵模式——如果你更喜欢这个词的话）。阅读还能不断给你提供不断增长的知识，包括已知的、未知的、真实的、新鲜的、有用的或者是正在消逝的、已经消逝的。当你阅读得越多，就越不可能用你的笔或文档来愚弄自己。

要读什么

叔本华说：  “一个人永远不会读过太少的坏书，或是太多好书。坏书是智力毒药，他们摧毁心灵。”

虽然这可能是众所周知的规则，但King却说不好的书在教他如何写作上起了重要的作用。

「小行星矿工」（这不是标题，但足够接近）是我人生中重要的一本书。大多数作家可以记住开启他/她思想的第一本书：我可以做得比这更好。天啊，我真的可以做得比这更好！对于正在奋斗的作家而言，还有什么比意识到自己所写的文章毫无疑问地比另一些人被付费所写的文章好更让作家们感到振奋和鼓舞呢？

阅读糟糕的散文能让一个人知道写作过程中不能做什么像小行星矿工（或  娃娃谷，  鲜花的阁楼，和  廊桥遗梦，仅举几例）是值得用一学期去学习的。

另一方面，良好的写作教导一位正在学习的作者关于写作的风格，优雅地叙述，情节发展，创造美丽的人物和真实的讲故事。像「愤怒的葡萄 」这样的小说   可能会让一个新的作家感到绝望和嫉妒 -——“我永远无法写出任何好的东西，除非我活到1000岁” - 但这样的感觉也可以作为一种刺激，使作家更努力地工作，设立更高的目标。被伟大的故事和伟大的写作相结合的作品打击其实是每一个作家写作过程中必不可少的一部分。直到你完成写作，否则你不能奢望在写作过程中不会被其他作家所影响。

谁读

1935年，在海明威写给Esquire的文章中，他回忆了当时他给一个知名作家的建议。这个有趣的故事出现在海明威写作上。

小孩：作家必须读什么书？

YC [你的通讯员]：他应该阅读所有的书，以便他知道他要击败什么。

小孩：他没有精力阅读所有的书。

YC：我没有说他能做到，我的是他应该做。当然，他是做不到的。

小孩：那什么书是必须读的呢？

YC：他应该读托尔斯泰的  战争与和平  和  安娜·卡列尼娜，由，  福楼拜的包法利夫人 ～（此处省略）等30多本书。

小孩：太快了，我记不下来了。还有多少本？

YC：我会再给你一天的时间记下来。大约还有三倍那么多。

小孩：一位作家应该阅读这么多书？

YC：所有这些，还有更多。否则他不知道他要击败什么。

小孩：你所说的“必须打败”是什么意思呢？

YC：写以前被人写过的没有什么用，除非你可以写得更好。当今时代的作家必须写前人未写过的或者写出比前人写过更好的书。让作家知道他写得如何的唯一方式就是和已故的作家做对比，而这是当代已存在的作家所不能提供的。因为他们的名声是由批评家创造的。批评家们总是需要一个季度里被拥护为天才的人，一个他们完全理解的人，并且能在赞美中得到安全感。但是当天才的作家逝世时，批评家们就不复存在了。 一个认真的作家所竞争的应该是他所知道的已逝的最好作家。 它就像与时间的小小竞跑，而不是常识去打败跟他同个跑道的人。除非他与时间赛跑，否则他永远不会知道他能够实现什么。

小孩：但阅读所有好的作家可能会让你感到挫败。

YC：那就感到挫败吧。

如果您一直想阅读经典书，却一直做不到，请尝试将任务分解成可管理的块。

何时何地阅读

史蒂芬·金建议有志的作家在任何可能的地方阅读。

阅读是作家生活的创作中心。我随身带着一本书，找到了各种各样的机会沉下心去阅读。诀窍就是在囫囵吞枣中尽可能细地去阅读。在等候室里都是书。演出开始前的戏剧大厅，漫长而无聊的结账等候线，甚至可以在开车时进行阅读。感谢有声读物革命。在我每年读的书中，有六到十几本是通过磁带朗读进行阅读的。

无论您是用“小啜饮”的方式阅读还是如一团熊熊火焰般阅读，如果你想成为一名作家就要更多地找时间进行阅读。

你必须广泛阅读，不断改进（和重新定义）你的作品。我很难相信一个阅读很少的人能期望人们喜欢他们写的内容。但这种情况是真实存在的。如果每当一个人告诉我他/她想成为一名作家，但没有时间阅读时我就能获得一个硬币，那我现在都可以买一个相当不错的牛排晚餐。更简单直白的说，如果你没有时间阅读，你也没有时间写作。

如何阅读

作家会使用不同的阅读技巧？大卫·福斯特·华莱士（Foster Wallace）提出了费曼原则来教你如何写得更好。他说，学习写作需要“以不同的方式使用注意力”。

不仅要阅读了很多，而且要注意句子放在一起的方式，所加入的条款，句子组成一个段落的方式。当你拿起一本你真正喜欢的书，把自己当成一个傻子去做练习。读一页书三遍、四遍，放下它，然后尝试去模仿它的用词，直到你的肌肉已经形成了你所喜欢的文字表达方式的思维模式。如果你跟我一样，那么你会发现其实你是无法复制它的。

...

听起来真的很愚蠢，但实际上你可以看一页文字，对吧？而且“哦，那真是太好了”，但是在你开始尝试复制它们之前，你并没有感觉到在这段文字中之前所带给你的感觉。

原文：

During the Q&A for How to Read a Book, someone asked whether reading a lot makes us better writers. The short answer is yes. Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. As Anne Lamott points out, the converse is also true – writing makes you a better reader.

One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original.

Speaking with the wisdom of experience, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace share their thoughts on the relationship between reading and writing.

Why to Read

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King explains why reading is so important for those who want to write.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around those two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on.

…

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

What to Read

Schopenhauer said “one can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.”

While that may be true as a general rule, King talks about the role badly-written books played in teaching him to write.

Asteroid Miners (which wasn’t the title, but that’s close enough) was an important book in my life as a reader. Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose – one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lectures thrown in.

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of beautiful characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy – “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand” – but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Who to Read

In an article Hemingway wrote for Esquire in 1935, he recounts the advice he gave an aspiring writer known as Maestro, Mice for short. This entertaining excerpt appears in Hemingway on Writing.

Mice: What books should a writer have to read?

Y.C. [Your Correspondent]: He should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat.

Mice: He canʼt read everything.

Y.C.: I donʼt say what he can. I say what he should. Of course he canʼt.

Mice: Well what books are necessary?

Y.C.: He should have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, by Tolstoi, Midshipman Easy, Frank Mildamay and Peter Simple by Captain Marryat, Madame Bovary and LʼEducation Sentimentale by Flaubert, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Joyceʼs Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Fielding, Le Rouge et le Noire and La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, The Brothers Karamazov and any two other Dostoevskis, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane, Hail and Farewell by George Moore, Yeats Autobiographies, all the good De Maupassant, all the good Kipling, all of Turgenev, Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson, Henry Jamesʼ short stories, especially Madame de Mauves and The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, The American-

Mice: I canʼt write them down that fast. How many more are there?

Y.C.: Iʼll give you the rest another day. There are about three times that many.

Mice: Should a writer have read all of those?

Y.C.: All of those and plenty more. Otherwise he doesnʼt know what he has to beat.

Mice: What do you mean “has to beat”?

Y.C.: Listen. There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasnʼt been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with dead men. Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead they will not exist. The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attaining.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.

Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

If you've always wanted to read the classics but keep putting it off, try breaking the task into manageable chunks.

When & Where to Read

Stephen King suggests aspiring writers read wherever and whenever possible.

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books – of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone’s favorite, the john. You can even read while you’re driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution. Of the books I read each year, anywhere from six to a dozen are on tape. As for all the wonderful radio you will be missing, come on – how many times can you listen to Deep Purple sing “Highway Star”?

Whether you read in “small sips” or curled up by the fire with a glass of wine, the point is that you need to find the time to read if you want to be a writer.

You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but “didn’t have time to read,” I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner.  Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

How to Read

Should aspiring writers use a different technique when reading? David Foster Wallace suggests a variation on the Feynman technique to teach yourself to write better. Learning to write, he says, requires “learning to pay attention in different ways”.

Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph. Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.

…

It sounds really, really stupid, but in fact, you can read a page of text, right? And “Oh, that was pretty good…” but you don’t get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in that text until you start trying to reproduce them.