I stopped reading.
Stopped writing.
The writing always dries up when your reading goes to shit.
It’s been a busy year.
And by busy I mean stressful, testing, and depressing.
I stopped giving a shit about most things.
That included my greatest passions in life: art, story, books.
But if you’ve always lived with meaning, purpose, and drive, there’s only so long before living in a void starts to feel like a prison and you need to break free.
So that’s my melodramatic way of saying…
I stopped reading, life kinda fell apart, then I started reading again, and I got things back on track.
If you can get control of your reading habits, I find a lot of other shit falls into place.
It’s like how Jordan Peterson tells you to clean your room.
That habit spreads to all corners of your life.
How To Get Over A Reading Slump
Some might think a guide to getting over a reading slump is unnecessary.
Solution’s simple, right?
Just pick up a book.
But it ain’t that simple because the reason that made you stop reading in the first place will stop you from picking up a book and starting again.
So here’s what worked for me.
Put money on the line with Spar
Humans are weird.
We work harder to AVOID losing money than GAINING money.
Two cases in point:
- Your daddy says he’ll give you $5 every day you read a chapter of a book.
- Your daddy says he’ll take $5 from you every day you DON’T read a book.
The 2nd approach is proven to be far more effective.
So that’s what I’m doing.
I downloaded this cool new app called Spar (no affiliation).
It’s all about social habit building.
You can challenge your friends to build new habits or you can join a pre-existing challenge and compete/rally together.
You put money on the line in order to increase your compliance.
This is some very powerful stuff:
Loss aversion + social pressure = SUPER ACCOUNTABILITY + strong new habit
You check in each day with a quick video and talk about how you just did your habit for the day.
Don’t check in? Your wallet takes a hit.
But here’s the cool thing:
Keep checking in and you can actually win money.
All the money goes into a pot and the challengers with the greatest adherence end up taking it at the end of the challenge period.
Scale back your reading expectations
Bookworms can be a bit OCD.
It doesn’t matter how much we’re enjoying the book we’re reading, we always feel like we should be reading more and reading faster.
So you try to pick up the pace, add more books to your bedside table, try to read 10+ books at the same time…
And end up getting burnt out.
Not many people can be naturally voracious with exclusively great books and retain everything they read.
That results in us slogging through a bunch of crummy books and getting disheartened with the whole reading thing.
So scale back your expectations and focus exclusively on books you really wanna read, books that will move you and improve you.
Life’s too short to read crappy books
They say life’s too short to drink crappy wine…
But the cost of wine often fluctuates according to its quality.
That’s not the same with books.
You can read the bookish equivalent of a 1787 Chateau Lafite…
So why waste time guzzling the literary equivalent of Lambrini?
Of course, tastes differ from person to person.
I’m not telling you what book should be YOUR Chateau Lafite.
That’s up to you to decide.
Just make sure you’re picking books that turn you on creatively, give you a good buzz, and make you better than you were before you picked it up.
Because how many books do you really have time to read before you’re worms’ meat?
And there are a lot of better things you could be doing than reading a crappy book.
Stop reading books you hate
You’re not gonna get burnt out reading books you love.
I stopped reading after a long string of mediocre books.
It’s my fault.
I’ve been writing paranormal romance aimed at young adults.
I really enjoy writing those kinds of stories (for a ton of different reasons) but as for reading within the genre…
Meh.
There are some great books in that space. But after you’ve read them, it’s pretty much a depressing slog through mediocrity.
But writers have to read widely within their genre, right?
So it was kinda a Catch-22, which left me thinking…
“Hey, if I don’t enjoy reading the mediocre stuff in this genre, maybe I shouldn’t be writing in it at all…”
That’s a story for another day though.
Even non-writers will go through periods of reading nothing but sucky books and get burnt out.
My friend is part of a book club and she started to dread turning up each week because the books were the kind that won obscure awards in even more obscure pretentious literary circles…
The kinds of books that have no plot, no hero, and suck the joy out of existence.
You know what I said?
Find a new book club.
Take a book challenge (like 52 books in 52 weeks)
As part of my scaling back, I decided to stop trying to read hundreds of books every year.
Reading a book a week might sound like a lot to most people, but for me it was a welcome step down.
I’d rather pick ONE BOOK that I really wanna read and dedicate a week to just that book.
No multi-tasking, no juggling other books, no dipping in and out.
Just one great book that I can be monogamous with.
Anyone can be monogamous for a week.
I’ve even got a little monthly schedule set up because I like to diversify my reading:
- Week 1 – A book to improve you: psychology, biography, philosophy, etc.
- Week 2 – A great work of literature: deep important works from the canon
- Week 3 – A fun pulpy read: study the craft of popular fiction
- Week 4 – A short story collection/book of poetry
- Repeat
Connect your reading to life
If you’re in a reading slump, it’s usually because you’re reading books that mean nothing to YOU.
- Why are you slogging through Book X about politics when what you really love is musical theatre?
- Why are you reading the latest bestseller when pulp crime novels from the 30s and 40s turn you on?
- Why are you reading another generic regurgitated self-help mess when you have a presentation on Monday?
What’s going on in your life right now?
Are you curious about the human condition? Regretful that you didn’t go to college? Going through a major life shift?
Choose your books accordingly, with meaning and purpose.
Not frivolously.
How to choose your books
The first and most obvious way to choose what you read is to follow your interests.
Or you can follow what you think you might be interested in.
I recently picked up The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field. I took the Ron Howard MasterClass, loved it, and decided to follow Ron’s book recommendations.
It’s relevant to my life and an area I want to learn more about.
If you want to read the classic stuff, the big important books that everyone lies about reading, then I recommend choosing from this list:
I love that website.
You can see a list of the 100 greatest books (fiction and non-fiction) generated from 116 “best of” book lists.
That list is about as close as we’ve got to a “neutral/unbiased” presentation of the best books ever written.
Another method I love for choosing books is to do it Dice Man style.
You can get a list of the 1,001 books you must read before you die, spin a random number generator, and voilà!
Or if you just wanna be told “read this, now read this” and you trust the person making the recommendations…
You could sign up to my book club newsletter.
Sign up and you’ll immediately get 7 book recommendations – my favourite books of all time.
And that’s how you get over a reading slump.
Happy reading!