I think every reader saw this Ray Bradbury quote as a kid.
There are a lot of quotes like it. Stephen King said it. Tamora Pierce said it. Every writer, sooner or later, gives that same advice: If you want to write, read. Read all the books you can reach and some that require a stepladder. Read cereal boxes and letters to the editor and other people's post-it notes. Absorb the written word like a sponge in the sea.
Nobody ever mentioned that most people have specific subjects of interest.
I was on the receiving end of all this advice. I knew I wanted to write. Conveniently, I also wanted to read like a word berserker. Birthday money always became book fair money. By the time my parents were probably eyeballing their own shelf and wondering if I was too young for The Amityville Horror, it was too late: I'd already devoured everything in the house by the light of my alarm clock after bedtime.
And you would think that I would have gravitated towards science fiction and fantasy, but while those things certainly dominated, they didn't keep me from reading every other damn ridiculous thing I could get my nearsighted eyeballs on. I've read an Auduban Guide to Birds of North America cover to cover. I read a biography by Nixon's speech writer. I read every book that a curious teacher ever poked through my cage bars to see what my brain would do with it, which is how I discovered both Hermann Hesse and E.L. Doctorow. I read the dictionary. All of it.
In effect, what I did was to train my brain to squirrel away all available information regardless of relevance. Which has been really neat, but being a Jane of All Trades also have some drawbacks. I sometimes have conversations like this:
"What a cute bunny!"
"Yeah! Did you know that lagomorphs can't vomit? Also, 'bunny' was originally a term of endearment that had nothing to do with rabbits, like saying 'darling,' but when pet rabbits became popular, the words came to be synonymous."
"Um...that's great, thanks. Oh, look, a duckling!"
I'm socially awkward enough without adding in the tendency to erupt with trivia, but somehow, people do still occasionally enjoy my company. Mostly weirdos like me.
The good news, though, is that all of these things rocketing around in my head, connected by thin wires and pulsing a thousand colors...sometimes they collide.
And that's where the stories come from.
