Reading is important for writing

I've been in the mood to write on my own story or book again.  A lot of us that blog fancy ourselves writers and we all want to write the next big book or series.  Obviously, my interests include science fiction and fantasy and I write stories in my spare time.  I won't bore everyone with anything current for a couple of reasons.  Firstly I'm shy about letting people see my work.  I'll probably never make it like that.. lol.  And also you don't just want to put material like that out on the internet.  It could be stolen and reworked and a person could lose any small chance they ever had.

I will share a couple of my certain failures with you however, mainly so I can share why they are failures.  I have always written.  I was writing before I could even write.  I'd draw pictures and have my mother write what I was wanting for story captions.  I've always written even when I was just drawing fan fiction of a favorite cartoon and knowingly stealing ideas from movies I'd watched.  I never intended to share that stuff anyway.  But when I started to seriously start writing, I would put a lot of work into what I was doing just to realize that it had all been done before and my heart would break.  You see, I hated reading as a kid.  I don't know if it's the reading I hated so much as it was being made to read anything.  I was more interested in playing and watching television.  I read a little, but most of my reading was assigned to me from school and I rejected it.  So I was embarrassed when I was writing a story about time travel... the idea that there were pockets of time that people would fall into like small ponds for example.

Kind of like the wood between the worlds in The Magician's Nephew which was utterly brilliant.  I knew when I read it that my idea was not only unoriginal but that that this idea was superior.  And that's just from a classic that I missed while growing up.  I read Treasure Island after I graduated high school and it was the book that hooked me on reading.  I started devouring classics as fast as I could get a hold of them but it wasn't fast enough.

Then there were modern books that I didn't get a hold of fast enough.  I was working on a story about an evil magic bad guy that wanted to take over a couple of kingdoms.  He was thought to have died 50 years previously but had some kind of magic ritual that kept him alive and he returned, to everyone's horror. 

Obviously it wasn't the idea for the Harry Potter series, but it was very close to the idea of Voldemort.  I had one Harry Potter book at the time, the third one, and it hadn't gone into much detail about Voldemort since it was more about Sirius and Pettigrew in the end.  It was before the movies started being made so although I'd intended to get the other books, I'd just been putting it off at the time.  Like I said, it's embarrassing.   And all because I got a late start reading and I wasn't keeping up in my favorite genres.

I think the idea I have now is fairly original.  Of course, there's not much out there that's truly original anymore.  Even the Harry Potter series borrowed and tweaked previous concepts.  But I think I'm finally onto something.  I've been fiddling with it for a while now.  I'm not very disciplined.  It just comes in moods and I've been in the mood lately.  So some posts between Star Trek episode reviews may be short until I lose interest again.