Trying to Learn How to Write Through Reading

This was what JC told me after I met him at Fort Dix FCI and he took me under his wing as another aspiring writer: you have got to read, if you're going to be a writer. I did so. Then I wanted to know more about who I was reading. I wanted to know when they wrote so I might get a handle on who and what influenced them. There was little enough enough information available in prison even with the interlibrary loan program. All this I have written about and will - if I live so long - be posted up here.

However, now I am in a halfway house and they have given me access to the internet and I am looking around for information on who I have read. I am not so sure that this will work for everyone. Remember I got serious about serious writing after almost a forty year hiatus. I felt a need to learn what had gone on in that time and the writers who might be able to teach how to write what I saw now as what I wanted to write about: the people back home in Indiana. 

I found myself reading a lot of Nobel winners at Fort Dix. They and the Booker winners were the writers I found the most interesting. Turns out the Nobel Prize winners have to give a lecture (back in the old days it was someone else giving a lecture on the writer's significance) which are accessible here.

The past can teach us what is possible in an art form (What guitar player doesn't listen to Jimi Hendrix?) and that can also mean what to avoid!

I will be picking on the Nobel winners I have read and posting what they have to say on the process of writing.