I have always been addicted to reading prose (I have never been able to read poetry). I read out of curiosity; I read to learn; I read for pleasure. As a boy, my powers of concentration were better than they were later; when reading a book, I wouldn't even hear my mother call us to dinner. When I was growing up, I read mainly fiction. In college, I majored in English literature. In prep school and college, I disciplined myself to spend negligible time reading newspapers: I reasoned that, in a short while, today's events would mostly become forgotten background noise.
A few years after being graduated from college, I found myself gravitating away from reading fiction, towards reading about contemporaneous events. As time went on, it just seemed to me that the world we live in is more astounding, more bizarre, and peopled by more interesting characters than anything that could be conjured up by any fiction writer.
For many years, I read at least parts of four or five newspapers a day. I subscribe to stacks of magazines specializing in a wide variety of topics. To this day, as soon as I awaken in the morning, I am eager to collect the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal at our front door and start reading-- beginning with the Times's lead articles and then its sports pages (especially during pro football season). I never cease to be amazed that great newspapers can be published on a daily basis, and I am grateful for the opportunity to read them.
When I was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, the public schools were in chaos. We had double sessions during at least the tenth grade, my last year of schooling in Jacksonville. I was never taught the rules of grammar, and I don't know them to this day. My parents sent me to a prep school-- the Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania-- for my last two years of high school, so that I would have a chance at getting into a good undergraduate school. (My brother had attended the Hill for three years, and he was matriculating at Princeton.) The Hill's headmaster was an English teacher, and the school put a lot of emphasis on writing. We had to write an essay each week, and I tried hard to avoid making the same mistake twice.
I know very little about creative writing, having never read a book, much less taken a course, on the subject-- which probably comes as no surprise to any reader of this blog! So my writing is pretty much limited to what my ear and intuition permit me.
Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) was my Hill School bible. I marvel at what I consider to be good writing, and I am bothered to the point of distraction by what I consider to be bad writing. Sloppy writing with unintended ambiguities particularly irritates me. I had been reading great literature in prep school and college, so most of the reading assignments in graduate business school were an ordeal for me.
My own writing experience is narrow and limited. In school, I wrote papers; in business, I drafted regulatory filings and wrote business correspondence, shareholder letters, and the like. Because my view is that anything that I might want to say through writing has been said before by better thinkers and scholars who are also more talented writers, I limited myself almost entirely to the writing that was required by my work. It has never seemed to me that I have much to say that would be of enduring value to anyone else. (For the same reason, I tried not to accept speaking invitations-- not that there were so many-- unless I saw a clear business need to do so.)
This blog is a different proposition for me: No one else has the grist for its mill. So if it is going to be written, it is incumbent on me to write it. I am finding that while I am doing the research for its entries, I am both refreshing my memory and acquiring new information. Am I also learning more about writing, from writing this blog? Perhaps I should get around to rereading chronologically all of the entries to see if my writing seems to be improving.
If I really am one of the people who learns by writing, I have no way other than writing to develop my writing skills. Nevertheless, I am considering reading some of the Paris Review's interviews with authors. These interviews should be fascinating to read, even if I prove unable to learn the art and craft of writing by reading about it.
