Intentional Reading Improves Writing
Past 50, Can You Juggle Reading, Remembering, and Writing?
For most of your early life, “reading, writing, and arithmetic” were the three tools you needed in your survival kit to get to high school graduation and into the world of work. That shifted and got more complex as you kept growing and learning.
If writing became your passion and the primary skill in your career path and beyond as you reached 60, the new survival kit became reading, remembering, and writing.
We can point to extensive information about these three areas, treated separately. The magic and the power of your writing, which comes straight from the memory of your lived experiences and relationships, requires understanding and practice in all three areas at the same time. Why hasn’t anyone put that together and pointed it out?
I have a theory about how this trifecta for winning as a writer past 60 works and what we can do about it. I have more questions than answers, and that’s why we have a comments area. Plus, we encourage direct communication via email if that’s how you prefer to connect.
Two Steps in Three Parts
There are two parts to writing, living, and getting through life: Understanding and movement. That’s the whole thing: Thoughts and actions.
Consider your present, past, and future, and this pattern is familiar in phrases such as: Actions speak louder than words. You are what you eat. Thoughts become things. Better writing starts with better reading. “Execution is the chariot of genius.”—William Blake
Silently in the background is the glue that connects reading and writing, which we become more aware of as we age, live more, learn more, and write more. It’s remembering.
What is the evidence of how much we depend on remembering to form the millions of connections between reading and writing? Consider this a short list of observations and direct experience: Paper and pencil, notebooks, journals, Post-It notes, writing in the margins of books, note cards and note organizing systems, bulletin boards, photographs, movies, and friends with stories we almost forgot.
The digital world put remembering into overdrive and threw us into a feeling of hyperactivity because our brains keep telling us that survival depends on putting thoughts into movement. There’s no way we can put movement to all the information we are consuming. This is called cognitive overload.
Digital evidence of remembering includes, most of all, the memory chip. That’s what it does—remember. Is this a blessing or a curse for understanding and writing? The computer chip is completely worthless without a human using their understanding and movement to put information into millions of software programs, such as mind mapping, notes and folders, and personal knowledge management (PKM) applications like Roam Research, Tana, Logseq, Obsidian, Capacities, Anytype, and Google Notes.
As writers, we learned and danced with many of these remembering devices. Meanwhile, the aging process affects us differently. Some of us started losing cognitive functions. Some of us stayed the same. Some of us became SuperAgers with extraordinary abilities. All of us noticed the invasion of artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT in November 2022. That’s a massive remembering device that is only as good as the humans feeding information and computer commands to it.
Does artificial intelligence have understanding and movement? That’s an article for another day. The short answer is, hell no, and stop thinking it’s going to live your life or write better than you. Oh, it can copy what you did yesterday, but that’s not understanding or forward movement. The key word here is improvement, which requires understanding, growth, and originality.
What happens when your memory declines or changes? That’s called dementia. Also, brain scientists have evidence of cognitive functions improving with age. No amount of remembering tools, tricks, or ChatGPT is going to make that different for you.
What about your remembering practices? What brings reading and writing together for you? Please add your list in the comments.
That Brings Us Back to Reading and Writing
As a writer, do you tend to obsess more about writing skills, practices, and conversations with other writers instead of working on reading practices? A quick search across more than 17,000 Substack publications shows that writing about writing and writing about making money at writing is far ahead of articles about reading.
That means we don’t need to go further on writing in this article because evidence also shows you are not writing enough. Instead, you are consuming information and reading. Since that’s what you are going to do anyway, let’s spend the rest of our time together today on reading practices.
Stay on topic! You are past 50 and maybe past 60. You have a better understanding of life, death, and your remaining precious days. You didn’t think about this so much when you were learning to read. You didn’t think about this much when you were chasing dreams, career moves, and wealth in those 40 years after college.
When you were in grade school, books were your only source for reading. At home, there was a daily newspaper, which became your other source. There were no computers or cell phones. As writing became more important to you, so did reading. Libraries, your library card, and bookstores became your preferred environment.
Let’s Stick With Books for Practice Tips
Reading, like writing and remembering, is like a muscle that you need to feed and exercise every day. When it comes to practice tips, coaching, and mentoring, reading gets the short straw. Sadly, most reading practice tips focus on college students—not on professional writing or the writing you do today in Substack or Medium. It’s never too late to focus on getting more out of your reading.
Better readers become better writers. You must read books both for pleasure and with the mindset that you’re investing in your writing craft. The art of reading like a writer does not come instantly; you must work at it. Here are a few strategies to make the act of reading fiction and nonfiction books as productive as possible.
Reading helps you develop critical thinking skills.
Reading exposes you to a variety of writing styles.
Reading allows you to study grammar in context.
Reading helps you expand your vocabulary.
Reading inspires new ideas.
The main benefit of reading is that it allows you to master the best of what other people have already figured out. This is only true if you can remember and apply the lessons and insights from what you read.
Start with an awareness of your surroundings and why you are there. When you step into reading, there are four different approaches. Most of the time, you swim in levels 2 and 3. It takes more effort and intention to get to level 4.
Reading to Entertain — The level of reading taught in elementary schools.
Reading to Inform — A superficial read. You skim, dive in and out, and get a feel for the book and get the gist of things.
Reading to Understand— The real workhorse of reading. This is a thorough reading where you chew on things and digest them
Reading to Master — If you just read one book on a topic, you have a lot of blind spots in your knowledge. Synoptical reading is reading a variety of books and articles on the same topic, finding and evaluating the contradictions, and forming an opinion.
Speed Reading is foolish. No one cares how fast you read or how many books you read last year. Resist the temptation to write about your list of books because that’s an immediate “delete” for many. What matters to your readers is what you absorb and can put into context for their understanding. What do you know about your readers that shows you are reading and writing for them, for their needs, and their aspirations?
Choose Great Books
Books, like food, come in two types—healthy and junk.
Reading time is limited. Direct it at knowledge that lasts. The opportunity cost of reading something new is re-reading the best book youʼve ever read. Read old books. Read the best ones twice. While this approach seems less sexy than reading the latest bestseller that everyone is talking about, most of those books will fail the test of time.
Beware of newer books. New books are full of sex appeal, marketing, and empty promises. While a few new books might prove to be valuable, the vast majority of them will be forgotten in months. Most of what you need out of new books, such as skills, professional development, recipes, programming, and trends, are abundantly available online.
Note-Making Essentials to Boost Your Memory
We buy books so we can write in the margins. That’s not allowed in library books, but you can do note making with digital tools, such as Kindle. Other digital tools enable audio books and your thoughts to pour into recording apps, which you can convert to a transcript. On the plus side, none of these tools were available earlier in our writing lives. On the downside, this proliferation of the ability to make notes can compound the issues we have remembering where we put everything. Having more than 100 tags in our digital space only makes things worse. Too many notes and so little time, right?
This is where intention matters. Instead of creating more notes, shift the reason for reading to creating the next story. Every writer has one to nine topics where they have strength, uniqueness, and something to say. Use those categories to make notes as you read. If your reading touches none of your categories, you’re probably reading for recreation and not working on your writing.
Try using this method for note making. It’s simple, effective, and more than doubles your comprehension every time you do it.
Before you start reading a new book, go to a blank page in your journal or notebook. Write what you know about the book or the subject you are about to read. It’s best to do this with a pencil or pen and paper. Mind maps work well for this, too. This forces a search of your memory for what you think you know about the subject.
Start reading the book, and when you finish a reading session, add to the notes you made or the mind map in a different color pen.
Before you pick up the book again, review your notes and maps so far. Repeat step 2 when you complete your reading session.
At the end of each chapter, write your summary of specific points. Use your own words, not the author’s. Connect this to something in your life—an experience, a conversation, or a memory. Connect summary points to the categories that define your writing. The more this connects to the topics you write about, the higher the relevance for what you are learning and applying in your next writing session
When you finish reading the book, put your notes pages in one place, such as a binder with a table of contents list in the front, so you see your knowledge grow. You can remove things you thought you knew. Reviewing what you knew about a subject, as well as what you learned, improves memory, recall, and idea connections.
This is how you learn. This is how you become a better writer. This is something ChatGPT will never do, which is connecting your life experience and remembered wisdom to new contexts and practical situations.
Nobody Is Watching You Read
Skim a lot of books. Read the ones that seem good. Don’t waste feelings or guilt on not finishing a book. The book doesn’t care, and nobody is watching you read.
Good books are delightful and pull you in completely—intellectually and emotionally. You can’t put them down. The dopamine hit is high when you find a book that is well-written, packed with ideas and insight, and well-organized. At first, you have a little envy that you wish you could write that way. Then you give in to appreciation for the writer who allowed you to learn how to write better.
Read voraciously. Writers are shaped by other writers. The writers who shape us are almost like unofficial mentors. By reading widely and closely, voracious readers learn at the feet of history’s most famous writers.
I’m impressed with so many aspects of this comprehensive article, and I share the author’s respect and reverence for reading. I especially appreciated the excellent tips on getting more out reading. One small thing I could add to that — especially for nonfiction books — is to take a minute before you start to review the table of contents. It can create a mental outline in your mind that gives you a framework for filtering the rest of the book as you read.
As a retired elementary school teacher specializing in reading and writing literacy, I wholly agree with your post. I would also add that emotions need to be with the thoughts and action, reading and writing realms.