One of the greatest disadvantages of reading widely as a writer is that what you read can cross-pollinate your writing so thoroughly that a keen reader begins to notice snippets, bits and pieces of other people’s works in your own literary output.
This happens often, and what we need to distinguish, as readers, is the difference between a writer being influenced by others whose works they have read and plain plagiarism. Intertextuality, the relationship between one literary work and another, is a healthy thing for a number of reasons.
One, writers are society’s sharpest needles. They detect patterns and motifs and, through sheer observation, isolate the major issues confronting society. By focusing on these thematic concerns, they draw readers in because the latter recognise their own experiences, fears and aspirations in what is written.
Two, great writers read widely. By reading what others have written, writers, especially in our part of the world, benefit in several ways. First off, in Kenya, Kiswahili and English are our official languages. While there have been calls to write in African languages, many writers, especially upcoming ones, write in English and Kiswahili. For many Kenyan writers, neither language is their first language.
Reading widely therefore helps upcoming writers sharpen their command of both languages. This is not only a matter of vocabulary but also of literary techniques such as dialogue, description, plot strategies and the handling of thematic concerns.
By reading what the best writers have done with language, an upcoming writer becomes a pupil, an apprentice not unlike a pupil learning the tricks of the trade from a master in the legal profession.
Reading those who came before us also sharpens an upcoming author’s analysis of what ails the people. For instance, writers who rose shortly after independence focused on colonial realities and the disillusionment that followed when independence failed to deliver the original dream of those who led the struggle.
This is not an invitation to repeat what writers of yore did. It is a challenge to look around at contemporary society and identify the realities that merit the attention of a serious writer.
They see the rotten intentions behind national budgets with huge deficits and yawning holes deliberately left open to perpetuate the culture of odious debt and budgeted corruption. They see citizens begging those in power for their rights and clapping sheepishly when a road is constructed, as though the provision of basic public infrastructure were a personal favour.
They see an MCA putting their name on a public toilet, apparently forgetting that the money used to build it came from the people’s taxes, the same taxes that pay the MCA’s salary and fund everything else, including useless junkets abroad comically dubbed “benchmarking”.
A writer who has read the concerns of the past, as captured by Francis Imbuga, John Ruganda, Austin Bukenya, Nikolai Gogol in The Government Inspector, Henrik Ibsen in An Enemy of the People and William Shakespeare, will look around today and see fresh material.
There are the excesses of social media, the psychosocial effects of Covid-19 and the frightening signs of a return to autocracy and dictatorship after years of struggle to restore people power, establish independent institutions and secure a people-friendly Constitution.
The devil, it seems, is slowly but surely freeing himself from the cross, threatening to take people back to the dark days. This is surely fodder for the literary canon of the coming years.
By reading, of course, we do not mean reading only novels, plays and short stories. Interestingly, when one starts reading widely, other things happen. An avid reader of literary works becomes an avid reader of real life because works that resonate with people are necessarily rooted in their fears, hopes and aspirations.
The characters encountered in books begin to emerge in the people one meets every day. They give birth to new characters in the writer’s imagination, drawn from real life. Reading, therefore, is not confined to other people’s published works. It extends to the lives people lead.
From this vantage point, wide reading sharpens a writer’s powers of observation. The writer learns to isolate themes, recognise character types, detect humour and notice the details that make narratives convincing.
In the same way that students of literary appreciation and criticism are taught to read texts as extensions of real life, wide reading teaches writers to become more alert observers of society, better equipped to serve as its mirror and lamp.
M.H. Abrams’s influential study, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), offers a useful critical reference for thinking about the relationship between art, the world and the creative imagination. Stendhal, in The Red and the Black, gives us an equally apt image: “A novel is a mirror carried along a high road.”
For, let us face it. In any area of study, to come up with a novel idea (pun intended) for a master’s or PhD thesis, you cannot simply announce something new.
You must first ground yourself in existing literature, establish what has already been covered in your area of study and demonstrate where your contribution lies.
You must know who has written what before you can credibly claim that your work is fresh, original and distinctive. The same principle applies to creative writing.
Originality does not mean writing in a vacuum. It means knowing what has been done, understanding how it was done and finding the courage and imagination to do something different.
Reading widely has become such a basic requirement, especially in publishing cultural works, that it can even force you to change the title of your next book several times after discovering that the supposedly unique title you had in mind has already appeared on five other books, some of them AI-aided. The point is not to avoid every phrase or idea that someone else has used. It is to know the literary territory well enough to make informed choices and to ensure that what you produce has its own identity.
So, the best cheat sheet in the book-writing game is reading widely. It expands the writer’s command of language, deepens their understanding of society, enriches their imagination and gives them a sense of the literary conversation to which they hope to contribute.
You may begin by reading other writers, but if you read attentively enough, you will eventually learn to read the world. And that is where great writing begins, in my humble and long-developed view.
