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Sarai Sepulveda

Professor McCann

English 1301.127

24 September 2012

Reading and Writing: A Spiritual Experience

To compare writing a whole novel to playing a football game in its entirety would be

accurate, for its mental and physical exhaustion are both of extreme severity. This is not meant to

offend any football players who believe they do not deserve the same credit as someone who sits

and types away on a computer, but the amount of back pain that either “sport” develops could

cause some serious damage. As Susan Sontag explains in “Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite.

Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed”, writing requires practice that searches for skill in the area of

reading as well. One cannot be done without the other because the symbiotic relationship that

they both hold is a powerful one that can deeply affect a person. The practice of reading and

writing are closely intertwined and work so strongly together that they create a temporary feeling

of dissociation from the real world and into the literary one.

The phrase “art of reading” is heavily complimentary as it attributes people with the often

rare adjective “artistic”. From a young age, one is thought to believe that someone who is artistic

is someone who knows how to draw, paint, or play musical instruments, not someone who

knows how to do the bare minimum that is reading. As difficult as it may be to comprehend it,

reading is an art and a skill that a lot of people acquire but have not realized. Sontag reveals the

idea that another basic skill helps reveal how one can use reading, “First, because to write is to

practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading.” Essentially, when one

writes, they are not only practicing writing but reading as well. When one writes they mark down
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words built into sentences and paragraphs, and the only way to assess whether the content is

worthy or not is to reread and sometimes rewrite. Sontag reminds us that this is okay and a

completely normal part of the writing process. There is no need to dwell on whether the writing

is good because writing that comes out with ease and pleasure will evoke the same feeling when

it comes to reading it. This is why reading is so important, it allows the writer to see their writing

in the rawest form up until the final draft is ready to be released to the public. Despite the

constant differentiation between the two, reading and writing are like any sibling pair, sometimes

ashamed of each other but powerful when together.

The reader falls onto a large scale that ranges from “I understand Dr. Seuss’s books and

that is how emotionally far I will go” to hysterically sobbing when Dally dies in “The

Outsiders”. One is not necessarily better than the other because they both demonstrate that

moment when everything around you blurs out and it is just you and the book. When one loses

themselves in their reading, they travel so deep into the literary world that it almost disengages

the ego. But Sontag partly believes that one can also lose themself when writing but the ego is

still present because there is always a bit of oneself in their writing. Personally, I tend to lose

myself in my writing when I am writing on something that has already developed in my head and

I just want to put it on paper. This often happens when an important event has happened and

there are so many thoughts circulating in my head that the minute my fingers touch the keyboard

it is rapid-fire. In addition, I also lose myself whenever I have a story idea, specifically a scene

that I created and want to write about so I can selfishly read it over and over again. It is truly a

trancelike situation when the words suck you in that all other senses simply turn off. When

writing, it is just the voice in my head, my laptop, and myself. Admittedly, one of the main

reasons I particularly enjoy writing is because of those moments where you forget about
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everything else and escape into whatever fantasy that is waiting for you at the tips of your

fingers. The crucial aspect of the trances is that they each result in significant improvement,

continuing the cycle that is writing.

To conclude, reading and writing are related in the sense that by working together they

produce literary trances where writers enter whole other worlds. The practices of reading and

writing are dependent on each other as they require each skill for one to lead to the other. After

continuous practice, the writer refines these skills and discovers literary trances, where one

completely delves into their work or the work of others that they momentarily escape the real

world. Definitely, it is something that not many experience for at the end of the day the football

player and writer are not all similar. But do not doubt the exhilarating feeling that one feels after

winning the game, for writers, they never stop playing.

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Work Cited

Sontag, Susan. “Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed.” The New

York Times, The New York Times Company, 18 Dec. 2000,

www.nytimes.com/2000/12/18/books/writers-on-writing-directions-write-read-rewrite-

repeat-steps-2-and-3-as-needed.html.