an undefinitive guide
1. Start reading before you are old enough to Think. Start reading while your mind is so unformed it’s not quite all the way human yet. Start reading before you understand the world around you, and never stop.
(Age is optional. You can always abandon the notion that you know how the world works, and go back to the first step. We are all becoming more and more human, step by hard step.)
2. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read shiny-cover books and musty ripped books and collections of pages that once had a cover and an ending. Read books about things that happened, and things that didn’t. Read books that are much too old for you right now, and books that are younger than you need, and books that are just right.
3. Forget about dinner, and forget about that outing you desperately wanted, and forget everything, until the fifth time someone calls your name it finally drags you back out of the pages.
4. Get a bit older. No, a little older than that. Discover new friends, and hobbies, and a million new things to learn whether you’re in school or not, and the idea that you should be “living life” instead of spending it buried in books. Stack the mass-market paperbacks and marked-up second-hand thriftshop finds and one or two shiny hardback birthday presents in the back of your closet, but don’t throw them out.
5. I was kidding. Drag all those books back out. Keep reading. Scrape yourself up a few times, head-over-heels, until you learn how to balance books and everything else. Except you don’t learn, not really, because the words bleed into everything, ink saturating the fabric of the world around you, and by this time your eyes are beginning to see the sweep of wind in the sky and the glitter of magic between leaves and a thousand stories in strangers’ eyes.
6. It’s too late now.
7. It’s too late now. You can never go back to the Normal World. See magic everywhere. Start to ask yourself if you like this plot, and how the protagonist should change it. Fall in love with life all over again, more gently this time, because you already love it: only now, the safety-net of pages is pulled away.
8. Optional: discover that wizardry is no longer hereditary, and anyone can weave these spells if they want to badly enough. Spill words out onto paper: boring words, silly words, buoyant words, dramatic words. Weave a tangled net that couldn’t catch a fly, and another, and another. In a moment of savage desperation, drag starlight out of the sky and spin a web that startles even you. Discover, somewhere in an ocean of ugly words, a kernel of the magic that first sang to you. Dig it out, and keep going.
9. Go back to those books that were too old for you once, and devour them. Go back to the fairy-tales that were too young for you once, and devour them. You’ll have figured out, by now, the sweetest kind of tale, the kind that lifts you right off your feet and leaves you to stumble home from a million miles away, hair full of leaves and eyes full of stars; find as many of those as you can, but keep reading everything else too.
10. Forge yourself golden scales and wings of words. Keep going, even when you don’t know where. Keep going, even when you have to come to grips with the fact that stories lie, and there is no guaranteed happy-ever-after, and adventure is harder to find than you thought, and sometimes bad things just happen without rhyme or reason or even a moral. Keep going.*
11. I don’t know what happens next. Let me know if you do. In the mean time, read a book. Enjoy the quiet moments, the crazy moments – in fact, go ahead and enjoy as many moments in your day as possible. Fill yourself with as much beauty as possible, and spill it all back into the world.
*I would like to note that most of this paragraph is 100% actually about me finishing a book two days ago and being stunned and horrified to realize I’ll never be able to strap on wings and fly with dragons like one of the protagonists does, or even go to mage school like the other one**.
**Is this whole spiel written in that same vein? Yes. Please refrain from taking me too seriously. Ever. Just go read a book.