If You Want To Be A Writer ...

... there are two things that you have to do - so says Stephen King. Read a lot and write a lot. Allow me to share with you my experiences the former.

Let's wind the clock right back. As in, right back. Directly after I was born, my fantastic mother (love you, Mum) was now running around after three boys under five years of age, trying to look after us, feed us, and turn us into socially acceptable human beings. And let's be honest: my brothers needed a lot of work. So, in the midst of all this chaos, she just completely forgot to read me any books in the first year of my life.

Fast-forward to when I was five. At this point time, I was just learning how to read, write, hold a pencil. Mum always tells a story about how she was tucking me into bed one night when I decided that this would be the fantastic time to tell her that I loved words and sentences. So I did. And she thought it was pretty much the best thing ever. No doubt this story will come up at my 21st, 50th, and then again at my funeral.

Anyway, after expressing such an interest in the written word, one would think I would actually begin to read. And I suppose, to some extent, I did. Said extent, however, was basically limited to reading Peter Pan picture books.

Several years passed, in which time I didn't really read at all. To be honest, I couldn't really be bothered with other peoples' stories - I wanted to tell my own. Of course, there were a few books, but not nearly as many as one would expect from an aspiring writer. I remember picking up The Lord of the Rings. And putting it down again. Repeat, times twenty. (For the record, I finally did actually read The Lord of the Rings - I finished it something like seven years after I started it.)

But the realisation of, and these were the exact words, "I should read some books," came when I turned fourteen. I was given a bookstore voucher and, when I went to spend it, I discovered that I hardly recognised any of the titles on the shelves. And so I finally got into reading. A bit.

The next realisation, "I should read lots of books," came about a year later, on my fifteenth birthday, when I tried to compare the number of books I had read in the year since my first realisation to the number of books I had left to read before I had read every single book in the world. Yeah. You can imagine what that comparison looked like.

Now, six months later, I think I'm doing quite well. I've surpassed my goal to read thirty books this year. In the last month, I've made an addition of fifteen books to my bookshelf, including these:

That's a five volume poetry collection of the best work from the best poets since the 1300's. I know, I'm a book nerd.

Anyway, tell me, what are your experiences with reading? Have you always been an avid reader? Not yet? Or were you like me?