Why it is okay to read books you’ve already read and sometimes there’s an alligator in your kitchen

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Here's our main premise this week: it's okay to read books you've already read.

Not only is it okay. It's helpful.

This is true for both writers and normal humans.

Rereading books gives you:

• New ideas
• Reminds you of ideas you'd forgotten about
• Let's you notice new things because you aren't the same you who read that book the last time.

DONALD LATUMAHINA writes for LifeOptimizer, "'"Research shows that in just 24 hours people would forget most of what they’ve read. You might get a lot of good ideas from a book, but it’s easy to forget most of them. Rereading a book helps you refresh those ideas in your mind."

But what I like the most about what he is says is this, rereading . . .

"It helps you apply the ideas

"This, in my opinion, is the most important reason of all. Why? Because the primary value of reading is the application and not the reading itself. Mere reading could expand your knowledge but application could change your life. By rereading a book, you can see which parts of it you have applied and which parts haven’t. You can then focus your effort on the parts that need more work."

For authors, Victoria Grefger says all the way back in 2016,

"YOU REALIZE JUST HOW MUCH THE READER MAKES THE READING EXPERIENCE WHAT IT IS. This is important for authors, and since the majority of my readers here are authors, I thought this worth mentioning. By comparing what you thought of the book the first time around and what you think of it now, and what stood out to you then and what stands out now, you realize just how dependent a novel is upon its reader. This can remove some of the pressure that we feel as writers as we learn we can’t control the interpretative process of our work and don’t need to. That’s a load off, for sure!"

So go forth and read those books again! It's all good. The experts say so.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Murphy, the grand-dog, says that each redo makes you stronger. There's a much longer and more interesting version of this in the podcast.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Our random thoughts come from here.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

AGNI

AGNI, Boston University’s literary magazine, accepts a wide variety of works for their online and print publications. The publication accepts poems, short stories, think pieces, essays, reviews and memoirs from writers all around the world.

• Submission dates: September 1 to December 15; February 14 to May 31
• Payment: $20 per page for prose; $40 per page for poetry (to a maximum of $300)

FUN WRITING EXERCISE

Over on the TED blog, there are 20 creative writing prompts from 642 Tiny Things to Write About:

Maybe try this one?

"Write the passenger safety instructions card for a time-travel machine."

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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