My morning commute to work is exactly the same every day. I put on my coat, grab my gym bag, and head down to the Cortelyou Road subway station. Once I scan my phone to pay the troll toll (MTA), I make my way down the platform to the exact same spot where I stand and wait for the Q train to arrive. A seasoned New Yorker—like I imagine myself to be after 13 years—tends to know which train car to enter so that when they make their subsequent transfer (or final exit) they are placed precisely at the correct staircase or turnstile. Or maybe it’s just my OCD, who’s to say?
As a matter of recent habit, whenever I am commuting, I do my best to read a book. In fact, it’s likely the only time that I give myself for reading—it’s nearly 45 minutes each way, from my apartment to my office. In the past year I was able to read about 22 books during these rides. This year I hope to read even more.
While most New Yorkers tend to mind their own business on the subway (on the street and elsewhere), this particular morning started with a surprise gesture from a stranger. I had pulled out the current book I’m reading while still on the subway platform and had just begun to immerse myself into the text when suddenly an older woman walked by and grabbed a hold of me.
“I just LOVE to see people reading books instead of staring into their phones,” she said. She lingered for a moment longer, squeezing my shoulder in that endearing way that’s reminiscent of those loving squeezes from a grandmother. She smiled from ear-to-ear and kept walking. The moment seemed to make both of our days.
Luckily for me, I suppose, she was only witness to me in this particular moment and not of the many other hours of my day in which I am, in fact, staring at my phone. But I will take what I can get.
I don’t have enough time here to go into the issue of phone/social media addiction but suffice it to say that I think we are all quite aware of the grip these technologies have on us and we’d like to do better to disrupt that ceaseless-connection more often. I wish I could say that the reason I am reading books during my commutes is for this purpose, but that would only be a half-truth. I am reading as many books as I can, from various authors and genres, in order to become a better writer.
A few months ago I quietly began working on a manuscript for a true crime fiction novel. An idea struck, like a bolt of lightning, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger the longer I thought about it. As David Lynch might say, “an EXPLOSION went off in my mind!!” I had to pay attention to it—I had to give it life. But I have never written anything more than 10-15 pages, double-spaced—how the hell am I going to write a novel?
It sounds trite, but the answer, I’ve come to learn, is that you write it one word at a time. Most of my research for this novel took place in November 2024 and within a few weeks I had what I thought was a good outline of all the major beats of the story. But I didn’t have words written on the page yet. That came in time—slowly, at first, but then there would be days that writing would just flow, seemingly without my control. It’s now the first week of March 2025, and I have over 23,000 words written (about 25% of the total word count I envision for the project).
I’m not entirely sure how it all happened. Or, I should say, it’s hard to believe it happened while working a full-time job and seemingly only getting in regular writing sessions on Sundays. But I have made it here, to this crucial point in the project where the characters are talking on their own, the scenes are starting to reveal themselves at ease, and the possibility of finishing the manuscript by the end of 2025 feels attainable—and less like the pipe dream of a social-media-addicted artist feeling the unbearable weight of monotony and malaise.
I do think reading books has likely been the key to this puzzle. Even Stephen King suggests in his book, “On Writing,” that if you want to be a good writer, you should read, read, read. And read more. “Good” books are just as great a resource as “bad” books—bad books might even be better. I’ve caught myself thinking, more than once while reading a book, “heck I can do better than this!” That’s not ego—it’s a realization that a novel can be anything and I do have the skills within me to do it. The question is, how do I sharpen my tools and make this forthcoming novel a masterpiece (kidding, kind of)?
For now, while I prepare to return to working on the manuscript, I will follow the advice of Stephen King (much to the delight of the kind woman I briefly met this morning) and continue to take a book with me wherever I go. I’ll keep reading while riding the train, sitting at the diner counter, waiting for a movie to start at the theater—if I have a moment to spare (and can take my eyes off my damn phone), I’ll take my book out of my bag.
Perhaps you should try it too? Who knows what could awaken in you, what spark could be ignited, if you allow yourself the time to escape, even for a few brief moments, into the worlds of imagination that a great novel can create.
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