Creative Reading

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've always felt that one of my shortcomings was that I am not a creative person. I'm very organized, analytical, linear, i.e., very left-brained, not right-brained at all.

I've also always been a voracious reader. I've been known to check out 21 books in one day from the library and have them all read and returned, on time, 3 weeks later. You do the math.

Once, as I was bemoaning my lack of creativity, a friend insisted that, in fact, as a voracious reader, I was very creative since reading was an inherently creative activity. I half-heartedly scoffed. Reading, creative? How do you figure? And then allowed myself to be quickly persuaded.

I wanted to be creative. Creativity is an admirable quality. So, I just as quickly decided that I had bought into the whole reading as a creativity bit simply as a salve to my ego. The concept of creative reading was just some touchy-feely, new age, feel-good, hokum.

I've finally taken some time to delve into the concept some. And I'm finding myself persuaded once again, on a more substantive basis.

I give myself permission to consider myself a creative person.

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The Creativity of Reading Fiction

The suggestion is that while many readers are unable to consider their own reading in terms of its ‘creativity’, they nonetheless describe their subjective reading experience in ways that demonstrate a considerable level of creativity.

Birkerts (1994) describes this relationship particularly eloquently: The writer may tell us, "The mother wore a shabby…gown", but the word canisters are empty until we load them from our private reservoirs. We activate our sense memories and determine the degrees of shabbiness (p 83).

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Creative Reading

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creative reading

Reading is not a straightforward transfer of information from the mind of the writer into the reader's mind, but a fundamentally creative activity - this is what makes it possible for literary classics such as Shakespeare to give rise to an endless series of differing interpretations (often referred to as "readings" by literary critics). The creative nature of reading, however, does not mean that readers' interpretations are random or arbitrary, and it is your job as a writer to guide the process of reading by providing cues and by paying attention to the structure of your essay.

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Creative Reading Makes Creative Writing

I can't say it better than John F. Genung did in his text, Practical Elements of Rhetoric, in 1894. "While the reader is receptive, while he is being acted upon by what he is reading, he is at the same time originative, vigorously acting on the same subject-matter, shaping it into a new product, according to the color and capacity of his own mind." What a sentence!

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Creative Reading by Paul Grainger

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The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in mid-air into another.

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, pg. 209.