“Write something that you would like to read.”

We’ve all heard this advice from other writers or people who are sick of you griping about dealing with writer’s block still. If someone told me this bit of advice right now (since it’s felt like I’ve run into writer’s block for the past year), I would say back: “What I really want to read is Red, White & Royal Blue or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl for the first time again, but I can’t write their sequels justice, nor would I want to try.”

So, here we are.

Lately, I’ve gotten into the (probably not-so-healthy) habit of diving into and completely losing myself in a book. I did that with Casey McQuinston’s latest novel, One Last Stop, and most recently, her debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue. I even jumped on the Young Royals train, which is streaming on Netflix, because I clearly couldn’t get enough of the “forbidden romance due to one of the parties being a royal” scenario. Now that I’ve run out of episodes and pages, I finished up Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, and now I’m reading Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. Salem’s Lot was pretty good and got very creepy, but I wanted to just dive into a nice lil romance novel again. Enter: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, which has since snowballed into other romance/fiction: Beach Read by Henry, The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, and now Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Hibbert.

Red, White & Royal Blue and People We Meet on Vacation were both books that literally made me laugh out loud, tear up, and really feel for the characters when crazy stuff came up in their lives. When I discovered McQuinston and Henry, I absolutely flew through those books—I’d ignore my everyday life after the workday ended, and I happily hunkered down by my reading tree with a White Claw in hand and my dog running around in the yard around me.

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

— Anne Lamott, "Bird by Bird"

I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing, but around the time when my dad got sick, I really threw myself into reading. It might sound like a time-waster to some, but who cares? Those books I read helped me a lot during that time. I was really young when he got sick and died a few months later, and there was a lot that I didn’t know how to deal with—I mean, heck, I was 12. I didn’t want to have to think about what was going on around me, so I read books about other peoples’ lives while trying to ignore mine. Reading gave me an escape when I needed one, and it still does. Now, I will say that dealing with your emotions up-front is probably the best-case scenario here, but sometimes you just need a break—an emotional, mental, or physical one. I will shout this from the rooftops until the day I die: reading can help people get out of their heads while also building compassion for those around them. It can spur something creative inside, unlock something emotional deep down that you didn’t know you could tap into, and it can also just bring you joy.

Whenever I thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always knew that I wanted to write. I transferred colleges multiple times, but I always kept the same major: writing (or English literature if writing wasn’t available). And when I think about why, it always goes back to the time when my dad got sick, and I discovered Sarah Dessen’s books for the first time. I found copies of Just Listen, That Summer, and The Truth About Forever at a book sale one day with my mom, and I begged her to buy them for me. I’d find myself staying up until 3 in the morning to just get one more chapter in or to finally be able to flip the last page over, feeling that pride of knowing I’ve finished another book. That pride, however, was almost always followed by a sinking feeling, knowing that I would never be able to read it for the first time again. If you haven’t read any of her books yet, Dessen’s books are normally everyday stories about girls and their relationships with their parents, love interests, friends, summer jobs, self-image, etc. She has a way of making mundane topics relatable and interesting, and I’ve read every single book of hers since. Her books allow me to just drop right into the story and live out someone else’s life for however long it takes me to finish a few hundred pages, and I’m grateful.

This quote above, which graces the very last page and last paragraph of Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, is what I have tattooed on the back of my arm. It’s probably about 3” tall x 4” wide. Before you think, “Was it written in the tiniest font size known to man?” No. I will settle your confusion by saying that each sentence is just written as a line, and each period is, well, a period. No one else except you, precious lil readers, and those who actually ask know what those lines on the back of my arms stand for. It’s laid out on my skin like a paragraph with the indentation and everything, but I still somehow get asked if it’s a sideways barcode.

Since I was about 13 or so, I’ve been trying to crank out a young adult novel. Back in the day, I used to only write on Word or Pages, and I didn’t think to backup anything to The Cloud or, god forbid, an external hard drive. So when I spilled a pumpkin spice latte on my computer one day after class, I lost my book that I had been working on for years. I only got… three or four solid chapters worked out, so it shouldn’t have been a huge deal, but I had been editing the heck out of those chapters for years and developed an entire timeline for all of the characters, and both were gone. I have since discovered a lovely thing called Google Drive and *cough cough* Squarespace, so the stuff that I’m working on currently, albeit not much, is safe.

Fast-forward a few years later, after a long time of having writer’s block strictly for a novel (poetry, blog posts, articles, and a children’s book somehow weren’t affected in this writer’s block?) and I’m in the process of writing a book once again. I started up again after I finished reading Emily Henry’s Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation, because I felt like I had this new outlook on what a novel could be. I audibly laughed out loud many times (not that silent laugh or a sharp huff out of my nose), and I definitely cried once or twice. I was able to fully immerse myself into those stories, and I knew after I flipped that last page that that doesn’t happen with every book. And I want to create those special books for someone too.

Reagan Fleming