WARNING: Writing Ruins Reading

Apologies for the click-bait title; it's not QUITE as dire as all that.

It's just mostly dire.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm still the kind of person who falls in love with books. Pushes them on every friend I talk to while the afterglow is still strong. Stacks new ones around the house, in tottering towers, all of them "ohmygod I have to read this right now," and none of them capable of preventing me from buying yet ANOTHER title the next time I pass a book store. Thinks about the characters, sometimes months later, as though they're real people who are real-life friends with me, capable of thinking about me back. All of that is me.

But the longer I write, the more I find myself incapable of turning off my "writer's brain" when I'm reading. I'll come across a sentence that's very expository and an alarm starts blaring internally, "INFO DUUUuuuuUUUUUMMP!" Or I'll catch a character looking in a mirror early on, just so the author has a chance to describe the length and texture of her hair, and the deep wells, or velvet pools, or piercing steel of her eyes. Cliche. Easy. Or I'll read a lovely description of something tangential to the story, like a sunset or a puppy's sorrow or abdominal muscles, and I find myself thinking "So? Who cares?" EVEN THOUGH I LIKED THAT PART.

Things that eyes don't look like.

No matter what I'm picking up on, let's be very clear: I'm almost certainly not doing it any better in my own books. I think writer's brain is roughly equivalent to character flaws; everyone is an expert at seeing the problems in someone else('s work), especially if those are problems one personally embodies...and that's about where the insight ends.

Of course functionally, this doesn't make a difference. If I quit writing tomorrow, I'd still retain hyper-awareness of too-coincidental plot hinges and deeply implausible dialogue. It's kind of like...I don't know, alcoholism, or herpes. You can stop having symptoms, but once the disease takes hold, it's there to stay.

Yes, I could have compared my vocation to the pills in the Matrix, but I chose genital sores. If you're a writer, you know I'm kinda nailing the metaphor.

So there's the downside: I will probably never again be able to read a Goldfinch without thinking about the flab around the middle.

The upside?

Oh come on, writers are tortured souls who only grow more tortured and that's why we're charming. I'm not going to admit an upside.