Last semester, in my freshman English class, I had to write countless essays, annotated bibliographies, and research papers about writing. For the whole semester. That wouldn't have been bad if there hadn't been 20 articles I had to read to base my work on. One specific article stuck out to me, and it was on Salon's website. The article is about National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. It's a contest that runs the whole month of November, where contestants write a 50,000 word novel, and whoever submits a complete one wins.

In the article on Salon written by Laura Miller, she talks about today's writers and their drive to be a great writer. She imagined how most of the manuscripts produced during NaNoWriMo are terrible, and attributed it to the ideology that new writers only focus on their writing, instead of reading to make their skills better. I noticed this is true for myself, sadly.

I realized that as an aspiring writer, I hate reading. I haven't even read the two articles I've written prior to this one! In a meeting with Odyssey writers at my school, they discussed their favorite books and book series, while I tried to remember the last time I read a good book that wasn't for a class.

So, yeah, I don't read at all. Maybe I should start soon, when I'm not busy. I don't think I'm that bad of a writer, but I do think Miller's claim about today's aspiring novelists and writers is true. I do struggle to come up with ideas for my own creative writing, and I had a pretty hard time figuring out what to write this week.

I'm going to make positive steps towards making my writing pieces better by reading timeless works rather than constantly editing my own work. I've found out which classic books to read, and hopefully I can give ideas to some other people that want to pick up a book but don't know where to start. My personal favorite is "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho. I'm going to read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde, "The Catcher In the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens, and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

If you want to participate in NaNoWriMo, I think you still can. You have until the end of this month to submit your 50,000 word novel, and if you don't make it this year, maybe you can pick up one of the books I listed and try again next year!