Some books find you before you are old enough to understand them. The one that changed me most arrived in Spanish with a plain white cover and nothing on the outside to tell me what was waiting inside. I was ten years old. I sat in a metal chair on a tiled porch in Havana and opened it without warning.
I have read it three times since then. Each time I was a different person. Each time it found the version of me that the previous reading could not.
What I understood on the third reading, a business trip, the book open on a tray table somewhere over the middle of the country, was that the book had not changed at all. Each time I had. What Golding built into those pages, the precise sensory detail, the images that carry more than they announce, was what made that possible.
This week on Ramos On Craft, I write about what a book that endures is doing on the page, and what it leaves behind in the fiction you write.
The Book That Formed You And Keeps Finding You is waiting for you at Ramos On Craft.
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