Reading Is Not Writing

Years ago, when my daughter still took naps, I sat down to have a little break between writing sprints. I picked up the book I was reading, Archetypes by Caroline Myss. I had just reached the chapter on Spiritual Seekers and Mystics and was surprised by her delineation between the two terms. Weren’t they the same, I wondered?

According to Myss, the spiritual seeker is still concerned with the material world, always looking for the new direction, and loves to learn. The seeker would readily order 20 spiritually oriented books without knowing how the books will help them on the spiritual path in the first place. The operative word is seeker; it can be difficult for them to find what they are looking for.

The mystic, on the other hand, is the person who has a deep inner knowing of themselves and is comfortable with spiritual experience, even those that can’t be explained easily. And yet, they still operate in the material world and move easily between and around and within the realms of mind, spirit, heart, and body.

The seeker constantly learns, but the mystic applies the knowledge to their everyday life.

As I sat there reading, my phone dinged; Amazon kindly informed me that my parcel had been delivered. The, um, ten books on spirituality I ordered had arrived.

There is a ton of information out there. We can find it in the glut of books in our homes and online, in podcasts, webinars, blog posts, and tweets. It comes from all corners: from self-proclaimed gurus to newbies to wannabes to actual teachers.

The same is true for writers. You can find endless advice on how to write a book, attend workshops every weekend, go to every single writing group in your city, read every book and blog on writing, and listen to every podcast, but … unless you actually write, you are doing nothing but accumulating more information.

To be clear, as a writer, one of the most important things you can do is to read good writing by writers and authors you admire. It’s like the concept of inhaling; you can’t exhale and create good work until you inhale. And what you inhale has to be good… not the latest post on Facebook.

However, constant consumption leads us into the danger zone of forever seeking. Until you take it and use it, it’s all just information. Before it can transform from information > knowledge > wisdom, we have to take it within. We have to practice application, taking an idea and applying it in our daily lives. You could read Lucretius’s On The Nature of Things and still gain nothing from it if you don’t sit with it, give it time, and internalize the message.

The same applies to writing. There is only so far one can go with reading. If you never sit down and put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, you have not accomplished the task of writing. If information were everything, I would be a genius writer by now, with the stunning wit of a gay man and the vocab of a logophile.

At some point, you must go from literary seeker to mystic, mining the depths of your experience and then sharing them through your writing.

Close this tab. Open a blank document. Write one paragraph about anything—your morning coffee, your worst fear, that weird thing your kid said yesterday. Don’t seek. Don’t consume. Just write.

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