writers, beware of noise

Remember the entry on noise?

I found this little blurb at an online writer's toolbox, and it couldn't be more relevant. For a writer, reading other shit can potentially open yourself up to noise, which is why you must stay the backbone when you're reading. And as the quote suggests, when you are writing, cut all disruptions and stop reading altogether.

I temper my enthusiasm for reading with this caution: There will be times in the middle of a writing project when you may want to stop reading. While [writing], I stopped reading books about [...]. I did not want my fascination with the topic to seduce me from my writing time. I did not want to be unduly influenced by the ideas of others. Nor did I wish to be discouraged by the brilliance of finished, published work.

Also, as Stephen King so bluntly put it:

Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.