If you’ve ever been inside an elementary school library from the year 1966 onward, you’ve probably laid eyes on the phrase “Reading is FUNdamental” at one point in your life.
And it is. Especially if you want to create good content.
In order to do that—to engage, entertain, and inform—one has to know how it’s done, and it helps to see it done by people who are better at it than us, or at least, have notched a few hits.
If you want to pump out good content, you have to READ good content. And nothing is better than a good book. Literature is full of people who are better than the average Joe at content (arguable, but you’d have to be a pretty great debater).
Remember Hemingway? Borges, Twain, Tolstoy, and Oates? Shelley? To read them is to immerse yourself in their talent, and who doesn’t want or need a little more talent in their life?
And, no, the Internet is not enough. This blog post is not enough.
In this techno-driven world, we have a particular way of writing on the Web, one very different than what one sees in the comparatively Luddite world of literature. In order to keep Internet readers’ limited attention, writers have to speed things up—write for their lives—because in this age of quick-tabbing—switching from a news article to Facebook to email to actual work—every second matters.
That is why we write how we write on the Internet: in short, succinct bursts of information, littered with links, short asides, and bolded keywords. Often, the graceful beauty of a good sentence gets lost in making sure someone’s not going to go play Angry Birds before he finishes this paragraph.
Before you Web writers tar and feather me, I believe that beautiful writing can exist on the Internet. It’s just harder for our overactive brains to read.
In 2008, in an article in Slate, Michael Agger wrote about a key difference between reading for pleasure, ludic reading, as one reads literature, and reading on the Web. When we read for pleasure, “we read more slowly. When we’re really engaged in a text, it’s like being in an effortless trance,” something so different than the quick flick and click of the Internet. He writes, “We’ll do more and more reading on screens, but they won’t replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind…contained, offline, tactile.”
In 1991, a group of neuroscientists in Italy discovered something crazy about our brains. They learned that when a monkey watches a human reach for food, the areas of the monkey’s brain that normally engage when it reaches for food itself, still engage while the animal watches the food being grasped by someone else. Neurologically, this works as if the monkey was reaching for food itself— but it wasn’t. It was just watching. From this, something called mirror neurons were discovered—parts of your brain that let you feel the heebie jeebies when a spider lands on your friend’s arm.
The Society for Neuroscience explains it this way: “When you see someone smile, for example, your mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, creating a sensation in your own mind of the feeling associated with smiling. You don’t have to think about what the other person intends by smiling. You experience the meaning immediately and effortlessly.”
I think one of the most important things about literature is that it serves as mirror neurons for life—and for the weary web writer— creating content. As the writer William Styron once wrote, “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” Through literature, not only do we get to improve our grasp on life—expand our vocabulary; learn more about ourselves, the world, relationships, our environment—we also gain the benefit of absorbing great content, letting our mirror neurons fire, teaching us to create great content ourselves.
I certainly think I’d be less of a person if I hadn’t read the books I have read. My vocabulary would be busted; my understanding of people, relationships, family, honesty stunted; my writing stinted and uninspired; my exposure to sentences so well-crafted even my mother might tattoo them on her arm diminished significantly.
This is why, I believe, to be a true creator of content (good content) you have to engage people in a way that reading for pleasure engages people, or, really, engage YOURSELF the way literature engages. Let literature be your content Gatorade. Replenish your content electrolytes. Shake it up. Turn off that laptop, unplug that desktop, power down your Kindle, and read a book—with no distractions except a comfy couch and a steaming cup of tea. Soak up that paper Prozac and refresh your brain, sanity, and let yourself bask in the beauty of a 7-sentence paragraph without any links at all.
Hemingway will thank you.
[image: PhilliesFan8]
