Algis Budrys: "A writer of fiction is by definition incapable of reading it."

I disagree with Algis Budrys on one point, here: I find Shakespeare (along with other Elizabethan / Jacobean dramatists) much easier and much more fun to read, because they had passion, energy, imagery and metaphors of a type I rarely find in "mass market" fiction. But otherwise, I know exactly what he means.

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"While the writing of fiction is usually a cerebral process, the reading of it is not. While a number of readers have the capacity and sometimes the inclination to appreciate the well-turned phrase, few have the patience to take delight in a series of them over sixty thousand consecutive words. Many people quote from Shakespeare. Fewer have read him except under compulsion.

"The most popular writers are semiliterate. Quib me no quibbles -- certainly there are literate works of fiction that have enjoyed audiences of millions -- over the tens and hundreds of years. The overnight success of the masses, however, is invariably written as though the author regarded the language as an impediment. And that is precisely so. Language, in any form, interferes between the reader and the writer's concept.

"It remains for the mass-successful author only to restrict himself to concepts that have already been half-communicated for him by the ambient popular mood. After that the purpose of his language is to deliver the recognition signal and get out of the way -- to travel no graceful paths, to cling to every rut of popular grammar, to be completely unobtrusive -- except, perhaps, to a teacher or a critic....

"A writer of fiction is by definition incapable of reading it. He does something else; he decodes the words on the paper, examines the structure of narrative which results from their arrangement and transposes this into an appreciation, much like Patton visiting Waterloo. Prosaists dig poetry, however -- and movies; better yet, music or photography. Writers have forgotten what it's like to pick up a book and just let the story envelop them. There is no being carried fully away, as there is in the concert hall or the Odeon. It's a recognized price one pays, but perhaps its full extent is not appreciated by all those who pay it. For except for the rich, uninhibited few who fantasize directly onto paper as Ian Fleming and Edgar Rice Burroughs did, writers as they go along tend more and more to feel that good writing is writing on which a high degree of rationality has been expended -- most often, visibly expended -- and that any writing they do that has not received this benefit is the less, in direct proportion."

-- Algis Budrys, "Bookshelf," in GALAXY, November 1971.