As a writer I do like to get down from the Ivory Tower on occasions. Some of those occasions are meetings with other writers. Lunch or dinner may be involved. Also gossip - hey, we are human beings, and writers are nosy by nature. Whining and moaning may take place. See above, on being human.
Also there is discussion.
Having dinner the other day talk got around to 'Watcha reading?' One friend revealed a project to read or re-read the complete works of a classic author, and the benefit this was having on her writing.
I am not much on the classics. Read a lot of them in school, and in those days (I know, dinosaurs) you were expected to read around the set texts. Haven't done much that way since. I referred last week to abandoning a list of reading I was supposed to do for an exam and choosing the drama question instead. Now that was a completely different story. Shakespeare, the Jacobeans, Theatre of the Absurd - an awful lot of Beckett, Pinter, Osborne, Genet. and a lot of it a bit weird. And yes, it was all still pretty new then. I am that old. Thing is, I think it fed into my writing - rhythm, dialogue, silence, pauses (Thank you, Harold). Influences do matter. With some people it is films - thriller writers often reference Film Noir classics. I gather that video games are also influencers now. Won't happen to me, but if it works ...
Writers are sponges, they soak up all sorts of things. And then they come back - in books.
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