Reading is not Writing

I have always wanted to write some book length nonfiction, and a few years ago I decided that the format for me was biography or memoir. The notion never went any further, until this Christmas I received a little more impetus in the form of the brilliant Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach and Kristen Keckler. They have disabused me of the notion that sitting in a comfortable chair reading someone else’s nonfiction book hardly constitutes me writing my own.

Perhaps there is a stage of preparing for the new book which involves soaking up information, especially if you’re writing about a…