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- On using texts for your own purposes
On using texts for your own purposes
Will Brown
April 20, 2025
If you’re going to become a writer, you must change your relationship to reading.
You can longer allow yourself to be totally absorbed by your reading. At least not in the way you’ve been accustomed to. Reading can longer be only a pleasurable indulgence. (Although it must still be that, as well).
Instead, you must carry the intention of writing over into the reading you do. Not always consciously, necessarily — but in the back of your mind.
The act of writing requires a certain detachment from what’s already been said by others, in order that you might consider what you have to say, and how you might say it.
“What I look for in a work is what will enable or impede an aspets of my own activity.”
“Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts […] will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about. […] You also have to think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately.”