I know I am not the only person who experienced this, yet I have struggled for years to find any kind of logical explanation for it, or actionable advice to address it.
Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book.
Or a magazine.
Or a short story.
Or more than a news item, blog post, or some intellectual empty calories online.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop loving books. I didn’t lose my genuine, lifelong love of reading. I just couldn’t find a way to stay focused, to step out of the corporeal world for a little bit, and just enjoy where the words took me.
A friend of mine suspects that it’s an expression of hypervigilance, a consequence of how unimaginably terrible things got, and how fast. (Oh, you sweet Summer 2016 Child, you have no idea how much worse things can and will become). That rings true for me, but it’s incomplete, and I still don’t know what is missing.
“But Wil Wheaton,” you are likely saying at this time, “you are an award-winning audiobook narrator. You read to me almost every day!”
Yes, I can confirm that both of those things are true, and I will gently tap the sign in my house that says “You must go to work, Wil Wheaton.”
So I was able to read, but only when it was for work. See, I wasn’t just dropping into a chair and reading for fun, I was supporting my family. I will crawl over broken glass for my family, so reading a book (which I enjoy!) isn’t a heavy lift. I mean, that’s a huge privilege, and I am grateful for it.
Last year, I think I read … I don’t know, fewer than 10 things of substance — well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate. I’m working on my short story writing skills, so I have read a lot of individual entries in a few Best Of sci-fi collections, and I revisited Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. But, again, that was in pursuit of developing a skill … using the work excuse again. And I somehow convinced myself that a short story — which is a lot of work to create — somehow didn’t count because it wasn’t a whole book. Well, maybe don’t do that this year, Wil.
But whatever it takes, right? The important thing is, I was making some time to read (and as Stephen King admonishes all of us, gently, but still, if you don’t make time to read, you don’t have time to write.)
This is where I dip off the main spine of this post for a moment to share, without going into specifics, that I made a deliberate choice about two years ago to begin a Season in my life. A Season is, according to whoever suggested it to me a million years ago, a broadly-defined choice to make some changes without the pressure and overwhelm of big and specific goals. The common example comes out of New Year’s Resolutions: “I want to lose X pounds” can be daunting, and when we inevitably stumble, demoralizing, and we give up. Rather than that, choose a Season instead: “This is my Season of Healthy Habits”. What are those healthy habits? Maybe walking more, maybe going to the gym regularly, maybe it’s about food choices. The thing is, I am now doing what I would be doing to lose the weight, but it isn’t about losing the weight. It’s about being focused on these other things that will support losing x pounds all on their own, and I’m not obsessed with the scale. I’m not going to get frustrated and demoralized, and ultimately give up, because it’s about the journey instead of the destination.
So I constantly ask myself, “how does this support my Season?” And I make my choices without judgment, doing my best to choose wisely.
I feel like I’ve oversimplified it, but if that’s intriguing to you, and you want to try it yourself, you have a place to start.
The writing, narrating, and publicity cycle for Still Just A Geek was wonderful, and exciting, and something I will cherish forever. It also uncovered a metric fuckton of trauma that I hadn’t worked through. So I started my Season of Healing, and it’s been ongoing ever since, with truly meaningful results. I still have CPTSD, I still struggle with anxiety and panic from time to time, but it’s getting better. I am in such a better place than I was when I started. The Work continues, and that’s its whole own post.
As 2024 was ending (and the end of the year REALLY crept up on me this time) I began to wonder if I could invite a new Season to overlap with the current one, like those magical days of Winter becoming Spring.
I know it’s only four days into the year, but I did make the deliberate choice — not a Resolution — to begin The Season of Writing More Fiction.
And since you really can’t write if you don’t read, whatever was blocking me from reading since 2016 has simply vanished. Just like that. I know it’s only four days, and I am not getting out ahead of my skis or spiking the ball before I even begin the return. That struggle to stay focused, to find joy in the experience, may come back. If it does, I’ll have to muddle through it, which is something I feel capable of doing, since this is a Season and not a Resolution. This is just a choice, not a test, and there is so much freedom in that. I feel this excitement to devour stories and characters from other creators, to fully experience their worlds while I let them inspire the creation of my own. I feel this desire and excitement in my body in a way I haven’t in so long, I’d forgotten what it felt like. I feel the part of me who identifies as a Reader, the part of me I guarded so closely and protected from all the abuse and exploitation, waking up and getting excited in a way I haven’t felt in at least eight years.
Which brings me to the “tiny little thing” I was “just gonna write real quick in my blog while I have my coffee”:
I started a book yesterday called The Ministry of Time. I’m only 18 pages into it, but I am already captivated by the setting, characters, and the author’s voice (note to self: earn your readers’ attention this way, as quickly as you can, Wil).
This is on the jacket, so it doesn’t spoil anything for you:
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.
Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.
Sounds great, right? It is. I am megahyped to get back into it as soon as I publish this post.
I noticed something about the way I read books, yesterday. When I start a book, it’s like I’m sitting in an empty space, completely surrounded by the fog of war. Over some number of pages, that fog is pushed back and the world in the book begins to populate the formerly-empty space. Eventually, that space is on the other side of a portal that I step through as effortlessly as I open the cover of the book. I guess I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I didn’t actually notice and note it until yesterday.
And that’s because, while I was greatly enjoying the world building and meeting the characters, I was really struggling to hear Commander Gore. My brain defaulted to this sort of grandiose, bombastic, entirely wrong voice that seemed to be inspired wholly by Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen.
This was weird, because I have never done this while reading silently. Sure, when I’m narrating I use voices, but never while reading on my own. I have always heard character voices in my own inner voice, or a neutral voice which is really just my inner voice not admitting it isn’t fooling anyone.
I read a few more lines. The author described him as being 37, and even though he’s from 1845, I knew immediately that he sounded like The Guy From The Gentlemen (Theo James, I’m not proud that I had to look him up). It just clicked perfectly.
And I was like, “I just cast an actor to play a role in the book I’m reading. Holy shit. That’s so cool and I can’t believe I have never done that before.”
He’s playing opposite Billie Piper, if you were wondering, and they have fantastic chemistry.
I have never done this before. But now that I stumbled into it, I don’t think I can’t NOT do this with every novel I read.
And now I’m left to wonder if casting actors for character voices when you read silently in your head is a thing that people do, and I’m just late to the party, or if this is some weird thing that only happens in my weird brain.
If it’s just me, that’s a bummer. It’s satisfying and kind of fun to try out different actors in the same role and see who gets the job.
Maybe this is part of the change in my head that’s happening as I begin my season of reading and growing as a short fiction writer?
Maybe it’s best at this time to simply accept the gift with gratitude, and enjoy it.
Yes, that feels like a good Seasonal Choice.
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-Dude … I’m about your age, and had the same thing … I even made the same not resolution.
I spent my life an avid reader. I got in trouble in 2nd grade for reading a Star Trek novel that the teacher thought was not age appropriate (my dad vouched for it though, saying Star Trek is reliably family friendly, and it was true in 1982.) I thought it was due to my sudden need for reading glasses, but I’m not sure. It’s interesting seeing a fellow nerd having the same issue though.
It’s not your fault you began to have trouble reading anything of length in 2016, Will. Both the U.S. and much of the world began dropping into the depths of vapidness and stupidity with the elections of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsarano, Boris Johnson and other like-minded fools. It was an insidious plague of ineptness where the ongoing plague of anti-vaccinations began with a scourge of anti-intellectualism. I fell victim to it, too; many of us with more than a smattering of brain cells did. Again, it wasn’t our fault. Like a flu virus, anti-intellectualism spreads quickly and infects many – if only for a short while. Please don’t feel bad, Will.
On a side note, I’ve seen you several times on “The Big Bang Theory” and truly enjoy your brief appearances. Best wishes for your writing and acting career, brother!
Glad to know I am not alone. In 2022 I realized I hadn’t more than 2 or 3 books in the last year and my average had been 50-60. I had to make a conscious effort to get back into reading so I set a daily goal that year to read 30 minutes a day. Best decision I have made post pandemic.
Depends on the book but yeah, I’ve cast actors as characters in books before. Sometimes I get a clear visual picture, other times I don’t. Sometimes I ‘read’ the book in different voices, sometimes it’s my own voice. When I’ve mentally cast an actor in a book-role, I’ll often hear their dialogue (or the scenes from their POV) in that actor’s voice. Sometimes I’m ‘watching’ the story in my brain as though it were a movie when I’m reading, sometimes the story just washes over me with no visual input at all. It doesn’t necessarily correlate with the quality of the writing, though some authors really put my brain in the right ‘zone’ for detailed imagining.
I never fail to be amazed at how different everyone’s brains are, how there is so much we just don’t know about how each individual person interprets and interacts with the world.
I have done that forever but only with Stephen King books. I used to have a coworker and we would spend hours discussing who was the perfect match for characters. We worked night shift so had time to talk and work. I had forgotten about this. Thanks for the memories.
I’ve had the same problem with reading, or that is, not reading anything of substance for the past few years, and your friend’s diagnosis of hypervigilance makes a lot of sense. The world around us seems to be going to pieces, we’ve been subjected to the whims of a man and a movement that enjoy chaos and court it, and just when we thought things might be getting sorted out again he’s back.
I like your idea of Seasons instead of Resolutions. This year, I had already decided, would be my season of getting back to reading like I used to do. After all, I was the kid who once read 100 books in one week while I was recovering in bed from back surgery. (I had that many books to read because my classmates collected and brought me a couple of boxes of their own books to read. I was 11 so these weren’t War and Peace, but they weren’t picture books either!) Good luck with your season, and I will keep working on mine.
I find that I do usually have voices in my head for different characters, although it’s never occurred to me to think of an actor’s voice. I like that idea and I will borrow that from you. Thanks!
To your latter thought – I’m aphantasic, so I don’t have a mind’s eye (or ear really). I experience things more as a visceral, inverse out-of-body kind of thing. So I don’t cast – when the story gives descriptions (if it’s written well) it’s the sensation that I’m in the moment and …know?… what the world around me is. It’s kind of hard to explain.
A life of seasons, not resolutions…I love this and can already feel how it’s profound reframe has reshaped my thinking/being. And, I love your self-compassionate description of how it recently enfolded for you. Thanks for sharing it all.
How timely, I too have reached a point in my life for a “season concept”
I retire this year and it will be a series of “seasonal changes” in my desires and goals.
Keep up the good work and I am looking forward to that short story, from your description it feels much like King’s 11/22/63.
Oh man, can I relate to not reading. I’ve struggled to finish or even begin any books for years now.
Had to force myself to re-read Hitchikers Guide as a comfort book, but even that was a struggle.
I have put it down to the fact that I am trying to write my own stuff. More actively than previous attempts. And my brain was somehow trying to shut out outside influences.
Hasn’t stopped me buying books though!
I am going to take on board the seasoning, and see where it goes. Great idea.
Thanks!
Fog of War is a good analogy. I write stories <1000 for oral storytelling, and tell regularly. I have only a few words to shift the spell left by the previous teller and bring the audience into my world, 125 words before the Invitation, 250 before the Point of No Return. (I don’t start with the ruler, but when a story falls flat, comparing it to the ruler usually tells me the ratios are wrong, or This Sentence is in a key place so I should lean into it.) Then I have 125 words to Bring the reader safely home.
Studying haiku and related forms has helped me tighten descriptions. Item, Movement, and Sense works well. Often one is implied, especially another is strongly associated with it, eg apple pie automatically includes a scent. As with the ruler, I start with the scene and the story, then, if it falls flat, check the formula, eg there’s already movement, so adding a temperature would be more effective than another movement. (So many senses to choose from!)
When preparing a story, I often experiment with how other tellers would do it, to break me out of habits, especially those I’m not aware of. Thanks for suggesting that when reading to myself!
Your not the only one who casts actors for the characters in the books they read/write. My son is a writer and he was sharing a story idea with me the other day and we both agreed that Jason Stratham would be the best actor to play the role of the lead character.
I had to create voices when I first read the Harry Potter books to my child, and as we were keeping ahead of the films as they were released, I knew my voices would soon be tested against real actors. I knew Robbie Coltrane was going to be Hagrid, so I was pretty close on that. Oddly I voiced Dobby almost eerily identical to the film.
I’m not casting actors, but I always ‘hear’ the people in books. That makes it almost impossible for me to listen to audio books, because the voices never match. Often it’s the same with TV series. I couldn’t watch more than 20 minutes of the first episode of Game of Thrones, because the characters were wrong, i.e. not matching what they had looked and sounded like in the books (for me, of course).
Sorry to be a nitpicker, but it wasn’t Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen; it was the late John Neville. It was his first film after a long theatre career. He also appeared in The X-Files as the Well-Manicured Man.
I started doing book fancasting in my head a few years ago. One day I realized that Diane Duane’s great alien spider character, K’t’s’lk, who does a lot of singing, sounded exactly like Julie Andrews in my head, and it spiraled out from there.
The Season idea is inspiring, thanks. And thanks for hanging in there and continuing to create.
The female protagonist in The Ministry of Time is British-Cambodian – might want to recast Billie Piper in another role…
My “problem” with reading started when I went back to school as an adult in my mid 40’s. I just didn’t have time to read unless is was for school. I started listening to audiobooks when I was doing chores or driving. I’ve never looked back! I see audiobooks as something the same as eyeglasses – it is what my brain needs now in order to do the thing I love. I always look for the any you have narrated! I’m glad you are getting your groove back!
Your opening about a lack of ability to focus while reading triggered me, hard. So hard I couldn’t focus on the rest of your post. I’m climbing out of my own loss of focus that ended my engineering career, along with tipping my mental health canoe. Rather than post my journey here, I spewed the tale into my own post: https://medium.com/@BobC_/loss-of-focus-f399ec46e518 Enjoy!
Hey Wil,
Thank you, thank you, thank you (along with everyone else who commented here) who helped me realize it’s not just me. I also had this exact same phenomenon happen and permanently dig itself in around 2016.
I tend to attribute it to a combination of shared public trauma (no need to elaborate), personal trauma (divorce, laid off, dog died), and my declining eyesight making reading a more and more difficult thing, physically speaking. I have felt a high level of shame over this because not only have I been a lifelong lover of all things written, but I’m also a writer. With a degree in the subject and a few short stories and scripts under my belt, no less. I mean like real shame, the kind you feel when you’ve messed something up and you know it was definitely your own fault. That’s how it has felt.
I think Molly above had it dead on as an explanation for at least part of it being like eating small snacks all day and not being hungry for big meals. That explains part of it, certainly the constant technological inundation that we are all under. As far as the other stuff, it’s probably easily explained as a common reaction to depression (losing interest for things one was once very passionate about, etc).
The worst part is that I had a book that I was going like gangbusters with, lots of people loving the characters, plot, world-building, etc. It simply ground to a halt. Again. I feel nothing but the deepest of shame over this.
But yeah. It’s not as though I suddenly became illiterate. Indeed I probably read and write every day (between work and this sort of communication) in the several thousands of words per day. Reminds me of how in the early 2000s I read William Gibson’s blog which he abruptly stopped writing, likening it to an uncovered pot having difficulty getting to a boil.
Around 2017 I started listening to audiobooks (including many of your narrations, which I truly have loved), and it took a long time to convince myself that the consumption of audiobooks wasn’t “cheating” somehow. I had a lot of teachers and other bibliophiles tell me this, but I’ve now firmly rejected it. Reading is reading, be it with your ears or your eyes.
Trying to get out of this rut has been exceptionally difficult and filled with false starts. I decided to take the chapters of my book that read as standalone stories and put them up on a website that I maintain for free. Lately and much to my surprise some people in Germany and Sweden have started to read them and are writing me, asking me when more is coming, when there will be an audiobook, and other questions including wanting questions about the characters’ futures answered, etc. This last bit has been the thing that has lit the biggest fire under me because I can’t stand the idea that I’m letting someone down. So it’s making me both frantically try to finish the first book in the series, and to record my own audio versions of the existing chapters I have in public. Mainly because I’ve noticed that getting someone to read is much harder than getting them to listen to something read aloud to them. No judgment from me, of course. It’s just the way we’ve all been wired of late.
Finally I wanted to say that I love your idea of “seasons” and how it provides a more ample and forgiving way to achieve a way of being which lets people exist in a way that is good and pleasant for them. Actually, I’m just realizing that you invoked Stephen King, who wrote the book “Different Seasons”… which contained the novella “The Body”… which you then started in the adaptation thereof. I’m not sure if you did that on purpose, but if so, well played. If not, then there are clearly no accidents.
So, again. Just, thank you. You have a way of putting things out there that I need to see when I need to see them, and for whatever forces keep this thing happening, I’m grateful. I feel like you’ve just dropped a metaphorical rope ladder down a pit I’ve been in for quite a while. And it helps to know that we have all been in this pit for far too long. It’s going to be nice to see the sky again.
Jeez. No wonder I’m not writing my book, look at all this! At any rate, I’m looking forward to seeing your new stuff as it comes.
OH, right, the fan-casting! Yes, I totally do that! About 50/50 people I’ve met and famous actors. I actually just finished “Hail Mary” and I gave Rocky the voice of Matt Berry for some reason. It just seemed to work.
The seasons idea might come from CGP Grey’s video “Your Theme” on replacing rigid New Year’s resolutions with broader directions of change.
I am confused by “Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen.” Geoffrey Rush isn’t in Baron Munchausen? Am I missing something?
Probably just a misattribution for John Neville’s portrayal of the role of The Baron. They’re pretty similar.
That’s really interesting, because I’ve started doing something similar (casting actors, or at least their voices) myself over the past year, and not just with what I’m reading, but with what I’m writing. I only just started wading into voice acting about two years ago, and I’m wondering if, for me at least, that’s a big reason behind why I’m doing it now.
For years and years, I’d often look for either random faces or famous persons whose appearances I could look at and picture when writing for characters, but never their voices until recently. But by having their voices in my heads now, I feel like I’m writing character dialogue more realistically, and it’s helping me give each character unique speech patterns, so I think it’s really helped me grow as a writer. I’d be curious to hear if you likewise start to hear such voices when writing your own characters 🙂 (…out of context, that sounds like we’re crazy. But hey, we’re writers, we’re supposed to be, right? 😉 )
Oh I absolutely do the same thing. I call it my inner casting director. Sometimes it’s just voices, though usually I see it as if the book I am reading is a movie in my head and I’ll watch the actors I chose play the scenes out.
I haven’t been able to read well in a while (divorce, burnout at my job, then COVID and That Fucking Guy). Recently I’ve struggled back, a few books here and there (recommended by tumblr people I follow). It’s hard to get the right headspace for it. The library has been very helpful because I can just request these books I hear about and there’s very little commitment. And requesting them has always been about curiosity anyway, so I end up starting the book just to see what it’s about and it usually carries through enough for me to finish it.
I lost reading in 2016, too. I’ve felt shame over it. I put it down to there being just too much noise out there. Everyone is intellectually drained at the end of the day. But I like this idea of “seasons.” I will be giving this a try.
I’m glad you’ve found your way back to enjoying reading. I know it engages me in a way completely unlike other creative storytelling media. I stopped reading for fun when my first kid was born, due to my brain being taken over by motherhood – I mean, I read to him all the time, but reading for myself stopped. It took at least 6 years (mid-2020) to come back to it, and even then it was slow. I wasn’t focusing on my own needs very well (ha ha, past tense). Using the Libby app helps a lot: it allows me to check an e-book out from my local library and get to it when I can, or return it if someone is waiting, without feeling guilty about how much time I’m holding on to it.
I’ve also developed what I call a form of paralysis, where I go to a bookstore and am completely overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities, as well as the commitment involved in owning a book. If I like the concept of a book, I imagine having to read everything by that author, so i don’t start. I know this is irrational, but there it is.
Voices: hard to say. I get used to the cadence of a character, but I don’t think I cast them per se. I do voices for my son’s books (most recently the serieses of Dogman, Wings of Fire, and The Bad Guys). I’m hugely entertained that in both The Bad Guys and the upcoming Dogman movies, the voices are “wrong” to me!!
You have a wondrous way with words, Wil Wheaton. I’ve thought of life as falling into chapters, but I like the way “Seasons” sound. Less clunky, more flowing. I’m going through a rough patch right now and your words have helped me. Thank you.
I used to read 300+ page books in a day, and easily more than 100 books in a year. In my 30s I was still doing this. In my 40s, I started school for a Masters Degree, and that cut back my reading significantly, and I have just not been able to get back into it since then. I feel like I hover forever at the edge of that metaphorical portal you mention, and I just can’t quite step through. I’ve recently discovered that I am (undiagnosed) autistic, and I find some of the struggles may be attributed to autism, but if that’s the case, why didn’t they cause issues prior to this? I just want to read the hundreds of books I have collected that sit and stare at me when I go into my library, but when I have time to read, I just…..can’t…..pick…up the book. If I get past that barrier and pick it up, I enjoy reading immensely and for hours, but I struggle so hard to get started.
Wil, the inability to maintain attention when reading isn’t just you. It’s basically a byproduct of how social media and the interwebs are rewiring our brains. There is a book called Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari that goes into it.
I get it. I’ve had reader’s block a number of times. Seasoning is a great way to ease back on track.
As for assigning voices to characters in books, I do that too, as it’s a great way enliven the narrative. My only issue with it is when the book makes it onto the screen, the character is usually played by someone that in no way matches the voice I chose to speak in my head. Cognitive dissonance aplenty! 😂
I get it. I’ve had reader’s block a number of times. Seasoning is a great way to ease back on track.
As for assigning voices to characters in books, I do that too, as it’s a great way enliven the narrative. My only issue with it is when the book makes it onto the screen, the character is usually played by someone that in no way matches the voice I chose to speak in my head. Cognitive dissonance aplenty! 😂
Oh, hey, I always cast the books I’m reading! (I’m a 1983 baby, if we’re identifying eras.) I even have a folder on my laptop with photos in which the people I’ve cast most resemble my mental image of the character. Google is probably very confused by my image search data, tbh.
I don’t know what this says about me, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dreamcast the books I read! It can be disappointing though when they make a movie out of a book I love and they ruin the casting, IMHO 😀
Thanks for writing about your experience having difficulty with reading since 2016. I also have had a harder time focusing on reading for several years, and I used to be a voracious reader. I think it has a lot to do with my social media usage, which I’m working on. You’re inspiring me!
(Finally, not to be THAT PERSON, but it’s John Neville who plays the Baron.)
I am forever fascinated by people who read like it’s a film, with casting and voices and staging and all. I’ll sometimes do the staging thing and I’ll almost always think through the set of a scene, but I am silent when I read silently and I never remember how characters are described in terms of their looks because I don’t see them. Effectively, I see their name in person form moving through the set I have in mind, if I see anything at all beyond the words themselves. It makes it much more interesting when I do my own writing to consider what I need to describe when I myself am not seeing it.
I felt this post in my soul.
Thank you for bringing the idea of Seasons to my attention. I love it and I feel like it is so much more attainable for the average person, most especially those of us who are a bit neuro-spicy!
I have been making a point of trying to get back into reading again also, it’s a thing… Anyway, I recently picked up Elevation by our dear Stephen King. It’s a stand alone book, but it’s a very manageable size. I was able to finish on my flights from Iowa to Florida and back. Not particularly horror, but definitely a good story to make you think and (surprisingly) more closure than I’m used to for a King ending.
Now I guess I will need to go in search of some Wil Wheaton fiction writing!
Funny, I had the opposite reaction. The world went to shit, and then bigger shit, and then more shit on a shit sandwich, and now all I do is read. I don’t want to do anything else. Like go out. Like do laundry. Like be a functioning adult. Just read.
I 100% have done this since I was a little girl and is part of what led me into my love of anything cinematic or written. It’s also what made me develop my own writing skills. I personally am suffering from a huge bout of writer’s block for the better part of 2 years now and hope using your advice of Seasons will help me smash that block eventually.
Happy New Year! Keep being true to yourself!
I knew your name looked familiar! Nice to “meet” you, haha.
I’ve had this exact problem and I started re-reading things. And that was a good gateway. It’s was easier to read things that weren’t challenging or where I knew the outcome. So for anyone relating to this post, I say give re-reading some favorites a try!
I definitely cast characters in my head, but not necessarily actors (could be people I’ve encountered in the real world too, but this is likely because I don’t have contact with real actors very often). This is particularly the case when I am SUPER involved in a book (that is in a series of books). I think this is because I spend so much time thinking of the characters in this situation. So much so, that when and if that series is turned into TV or a Movie I am inevitably chafed by the actual casting because it doesn’t match the actors I have already chosen in my head. I have to work hard to clean the slate and let the TV or Movie actors paint the picture all over again. Sometimes it works and sometimes I go back and re-read with my original cast!
I have been experiencing attention deficit when it comes to reading for the last couple years. I cant focus for long enough to make sense of the plot. I do know why this happened and I am just waiting to get over it if I ever can. I will keep trying and I will adopt your very excellent “Season” suggestion. A resolution is so large I always drop it. This feels much more manageable.
PS — I do visualize actors for the roles I read. For example, – I think Michael Ironside should have been Randall Flagg.
I suffered from autistic burnout around that same time. I used to consume books ravenously. I could easily read a book a day. It all stopped.
Lately, I have cut out most of what little social media I actually pursued in the first place. I have had to stop seeing a constant newsfeed filled with disaster. I cannot open my news apps. And for the first time in years, over the past week, I have finished reading two books for pleasure.
It may not be socially conscious of me to disengage from the world when so many countries such as your own, and to a lesser degree mine, are imploding. But for me, it’s an actual matter of survival. Will it be forever? I don’t know. I can’t think about that right now. I just want to immerse myself in stories that don’t constantly make me feel unsafe, and find some peace, so that it doesn’t kill me.
When I had a broken hip and couldn’t go anywhere my late partner gave me THE STAND and said – Cast it as you read – I want to know who you see. This is now how I read most books, my brain loves putting actors in novels –
I have the same problem. For me its because I get lost in the story and my mind starts playing it in my head. Takes a long time just to read one page.
I have always read with character voices, but I’ve never cast actors in those roles. The voices just exist as something unique for every character. I’m curious now, however, after reading this, if I will start looking to cast the characters.
This does cause some issues when I see a movie based on a book or hear an audio book of a book I’ve read because the characters don’t sound like I heard them in my head. I can generally get past them, especially if the movie or audiobook is amazing, but it’s disconcerting at first.