Steven Meehan

Despite my love for creating stories, I haven’t always been an avid reader. To my shame, in my distant youth, every day sparked new ideas on how to skirt the tasked reading. In fact, during those days, I only wanted to learn by watching television or movies. After all, I didn’t have to work to get the story. To a child who didn’t enjoy working to be entertained, this was a very tempting and all too powerful lure for me to avoid. However, those wonderful Saturday morning cartoons conflicted with the prizes I could get from my local library, provided I did the reading. As a result, there were many times that I faked the reading just to claim the prize. A tactic that I adapted to deal with the pesky school summer reading projects.

Now, before I keep going, I should mention that I believe listening to an audio book is just as worthwhile as pulling a hardcover off the shelf and reading it. Regardless of how you consume the words, whether through letters on a page, pixels on a screen, or words through a speaker, the result is the same as long as you let the words take root in you and spark your imagination. And since I rarely have the luxury to pull out a book or Kindle to read, thankfully, I have access to Audible. With that service, I have access to all the literature I want. As a result, it’s now my primary source of reading.

With the little mini rant done, let’s talk about how my love of the written word sparked.

Despite my desire to avoid reading, one day, when I was still in high school, a good friend of mine recommended Wizard’s First Rule to me. I figured since neither of us were avid readers and he was so excited about the book, to the point of giving me a copy, I read the first few pages. After reading those first few, I chose to read the next chapter, and then the next few chapters. Before I knew what had happened, I’d finished the story, and was eager to get my hands on the next installment in the series. That single book, well the complete series, in fact, was my entrance back into the wide world of literature that I didn’t even realize I yearned for. If my friend hadn’t suggested it to me, in just the right way, I would never have gotten back into reading. Let alone embrace my ability to tell stories.

And as the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. Now that I don’t have the time to read as much as I want, I keep discovering books and authors to add to my reading list. And I wish I could reclaim the time I wasted in my youth and use it to read or write, rather than being so obsessed with TV.