The Most Beautiful Words Bleed From Your Eyes Not Your Fingers. Writing Is Seeing.

Stephen King says if you don’t read, you don’t have the tools to write. Excerpts from these six books will illustrate better than words could.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

Jonathan Safran Foer wrote that, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. How do you read a sentence like that and not feel something? Bones straining. Those words crawl under my skin and whisper at me from blank pages and broken dreams.

This is why Stephen King says if you don’t read, you don’t have the tools to write.

Here’s another.

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

That’s Bukowski, from What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire and what divorced person waking up alone doesn’t recognize the color of forgotten love.

Here’s what all the writing tips say. Write more. Write more. I disagree. Read more. Read better books. Read the kind of words that make you stop and read again, not for the story but the beauty of how the words are woven of uncommon pairings.

We learn to write by osmosis. A gradual and unconscious absorption of how words fit together. Learning to paint images in words. Except we’re just learning to see.

Writing is seeing. The most beautiful words bleed from the eyes, not the fingertips.

Here are a few more I love.. enjoy.

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Beloved, Toni Morrison

More yesterday than anybody… and doesn’t that speak of pain more poignantly than leaving woe on the page. And yet, hope. For some kind of tomorrow. You can not go wrong reading anything by Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye is painful to read. But oh, the way she uses words. To paint. To show. To wound.

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A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee glasses and wet circles left by wine glasses. Visceral, like much of Papa Ernest’s writing. If Hemingway hasn’t been on your list since college, check out the previews for Old Man and the Sea or A Moveable Feast. The latter is both a memoir and guide to writing. I enjoyed it.

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The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

Read the center excerpt. How many words would a weaker writer have used to express this sentiment? Rambling about children being forced to grow up too fast. I could have shared a dozen excerpts and would still have had to handpick mercilessly. This book will gut you. If you haven’t read it, you’ll want a marker or notebook.

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Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina is considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written and has been made into a film over a dozen times. Despite being over a thousand pages in length, the beauty of the novel is the simplicity and beauty of the language. If you’re curious to browse the book, you can download it free on Gutenberg.

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The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret… If you haven’t read The Book Thief, just take my word for it and get it. 17 million sold. Translated into 63 languages. I don’t know if it’s at the top of my list, but it’s close. Set in Nazi Germany during WWII, Death narrates the story of a little girl book thief. The writing is stunning.

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If you have favorite excerpts from books that are beautifully written, do share them in comments.