I read all the time.

I am addicted to reading.

If I don’t have something to read, I will read road signs and billboards, brochures, or even the back of the ketchup bottle. I’ve never been good at sitting around and doing nothing, but it is more than that. My mother taught me to read when I was three. She taught me because I bugged her until she did it. I *wanted* to read. I can still remember looking at a book and wanting to know what those funny squiggles meant. I watched my parents read and I wanted to do it too.

Later, when I was, to say the least, one of the less popular kids in school, books took me to places that I couldn’t otherwise visit. I traveled to Victorian England with Mary Poppins, through the Phantom Tollbooth with Milo, and into the Chocolate Factory with Charlie. I met wonderful people like Frodo Baggins, the March sisters, Dorothy Gale, and Alice.

## Sparks of Creativity

It took me a long time to realize it, but when I don’t have time to read, my creativity drains away. I have trouble starting, writing, and especially finishing stories. The stories I force myself to write sound as though someone had a gun to my head. They are boring, to put it kindly.

## The Daily Commute
For most of the past ten years, I have been commuting to and from New York City by train. The process takes anywhere from two and a half to three hours. For most of this year, I have been working from home. It provides me a great deal of time to write, but guess what? From January through May, I barely wrote a word. And I couldn’t figure out why until I found a new contract for myself and began to make the daily commute. The advantage to reading on the train, and the one thing I miss about commuting, is that people didn’t interrupt when you are reading. Most of the time, anyway. I had over two hours twice a day to read as much as I like.

When I read at home, my husband interrupts to ask me what we should have for dinner, when we should go to the store to buy a gift for one of our granddaughters, or what color I think we should paint the first-floor bathroom. My son comes in to ask me if he can borrow a movie, a video game, or to tell me about the story that he is writing. When I’m done with work for the day, we sit and talk, watch a movie, or go out to eat. Whatever it is, I am able to spend time with my family, and that is good, but it also means that I don’t get the chance to read as much as I would like.

When I am commuting, I find myself writing more often, and writing more easily. During my commute, I wrote more than fifty stories. (BTW, many of them are in my book [Dreams in Transit](http://irenepsmith.com/#/preorder))  Once I was established in my current job, I began to work at home again because my boss felt the pain of my commute and suggested that I could stay home four days a week. When I began to work at home again, my writing fell off. When I was given the opportunity to work from home, I vowed to spend the commuting time writing instead. But I did little more than push around the commas on existing unfunished pieces. I wrote little or no new material and lost every narrative thread I tried to follow. I couldn’t figure out why.

## Like Turning off the Faucet
Then I realized what was missing. Stephen King has said that, in  order to become a good writer, you first have to be a reader. You have to internalize all of the stories you have read before you can begin to tell stories of your own. I think the need to read is more than knowing what has already been done. I think you need exposure to others’ creativity in order to nourish your own. I write better when I’ve been reading good writing. When I was traveling to the city every day, I did a *LOT*. My iPad storage was filled with books. I had novels written by my favorite authors, classic novels, and free books that gave me the opportunity to read writers I might not have read otherwise.

## How I Recovered my Writing Groove
I began reading between the time I got up and the time I had to start work, the time before my husband and son got out of bed. It was quiet, peaceful, and I could read without interruptions. It didn’t take long before my creativity came back. I began writing again. Better yet, I began finishing stories, and sending them out for publication. My ability to plot has returned as has my ability to plan, write, and polish a piece of prose.

So what do you think? Is it from taking the time to write or taking the time to read?