Turning My Back on Reading Novels

I've decided -- the project for the rest of the year is my novel. I had a breakthrough idea on a key character yesterday and this afternoon I'm going to sit down with a stack of index cards and see what happens with putting some scenes in order. This is a new approach for me. So far, I'm the kind of writer who sits down each day and picks a part of the story to work on, whether or not it's the next thing in order. For this novel, I have 30 sequential beginning pages and then bits and pieces of about ten other scenes, some almost stream of consciousness and in the wrong person and others at least in the right tense and everything but unfinished. So I have some work to do. But it will be fun.

But I've also decided to give up reading fiction while I am working in earnest on this book. Or at least to try to. I've heard of writers who are very firm about not reading the genre of work they are working on, but it hasn't bothered me so far. But maybe that was because the big thing I was working on was a memoir and I didn't need to be so worried about having someone else's story and voice infect me. I can see the point more now that I am trying to put together a longer work.

I went through the stack on my bedside table and removed all of the fiction. I placed the pile in another room. The remaining pile is an odd collection of memoir and history. I think I am most looking forward to the biography of the woman who made Veuve Clicquot what it is today. And maybe now I will get to those biographies of George Gershwin and Jerome Robbins that have always looked a little too thick to be intriguing.

I wonder if I can really get to the end of the year without reading fiction.

My one exception -- I just got "Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin off the reserve list at the library and I am going to finish it.