{"id":743,"date":"2011-05-16T09:25:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T09:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/?p=743"},"modified":"2014-07-29T14:16:52","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T14:16:52","slug":"the-many-trials-of-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/the-many-trials-of-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Trials of Dale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wish I enjoyed reading more than I do. I really do. But even when I read fiction that I enjoy, it&#8217;s difficult for me. This is not because I have trouble reading&#8211;I can read English very well, thank you very much&#8211;the problem in fact stems from the fact <em>I cannot turn my brain off<\/em>. While most people praise reading because it requires the imagination, this is why I loathe it so. I want to enjoy the prose and the narrative, the author&#8217;s wordplay and the feeling that it invokes. But instead I&#8217;m too busy staging scenes in my head. I&#8217;m too busy imagining the story as a movie, an animated series, a comic book; at times, even a video game. I substitute dialog on the fly, change environments and pacing, add entire scenes and characters that are nowhere to be found in the story, often to the point where I can&#8217;t remember which parts were the book and which parts only were in my head. At my worst, I&#8217;ll physically <em>set the book aside<\/em> to finish playing through a made-up scene in my head before continuing.<\/p>\n<p><em>I hate this.<\/em> It keeps me from enjoying the book, and it&#8217;s only gotten worse with age. I&#8217;m to the point now to where I do this when <em>watching movies<\/em>. Is this something everyone else does and actually enjoys, and I just don&#8217;t realize it?<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, over the years the best remedy I&#8217;ve found is to find enjoyment writing stories instead of reading them. It&#8217;s why I have so many half-finished manuscripts littering my hard drive. Unfortunately, I&#8217;m my only audience&#8211;no one else seems over the years has given them more than a glance, but what else is new&#8211;but even more dreadful in my mind is thus: a writer who does not read is nary a writer at all. If I don&#8217;t read, can I really improve my craft? I seriously doubt it.<\/p>\n<p>Not to mention I think it&#8217;s only aggravating my condition&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wish I enjoyed reading more than I do. I really do. But even when I read fiction that I enjoy, it&#8217;s difficult for me. This is not because I have trouble reading&#8211;I can read English very well, thank you very much&#8211;the problem in fact stems from the fact I cannot turn my brain off. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visionriders.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}