On Writing Better: Priming the Pump

Other writers sometimes invite me to read their books, and I seldom do. Especially now that I’m into my fourth novel about the Montana Vigilantes. From now until I publish this book, hopefully in 2014, I’ll limit my reading to “pump primers.”

These are novels that help me to write better, that make me think while I’m reading: one of my characters might be thinking or feeling (something) in this situation, or that’s a fine way of phrasing, or … Whatever.

I guard my writing brain as closely as I can. For people who want me to read their books, that doesn’t mean the book is not good, or that I don’t read a particular genre. It means I’m in writing mode and will read nothing but books that help me write better or spur my thinking about the current work.

To know what I mean by pump primers, read on.

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I always want to write better. To give the reader an immediate thrill of recognition that flashes into the mind shouting “Yes!” — that’s what I mean by “write better.”

Or if the reader lives where snow never falls nor frostbite numbs the end of his nose — if he’s sitting on a deck in Lubbock, Texas, where the earth cracks for want of rain — and he thinks of getting up to get a blanket when my characters duck their heads and bend against the snow-laden wind screaming around them, then I’ve achieved my aim.

My reading choices while I’m writing a novel reflect in the writing. If I read a story without the inner music that sets my blood dancing, my fiction that morning will be pedestrian, lackadaisical, hobbled rather than cantering. It will lack rhythm and poetry, and the metaphorical touches will strain to be clever.

When I was a small girl, we lived where there was no indoor plumbing. We — even I at the age of nine — pumped water to bring into the boxcar for drinking, cooking, and washing. I could pump some if Dad had primed the pump first. To prime the pump was to pour a small amount of water into the well and then pump it up again, with new well water gushing after into the buckets.

That’s what the right reading does. It awakens my mind, so that the right words flow into the story’s bucket and I know how it all should work. When I come back to it later, it does work, unlike using the wrong liquid to prime the pump. Then I have to cut and chop and chisel an indistinct form from granite, and likely as not toss it all the next day.

The moral of this story is, be careful what you read.

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