"I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor"
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Puig is arguing for a paradox every ambitious writer eventually meets: the very tools meant to sharpen you can also sand down your nerve. He grants the obvious first - reading is how you learn the grammar of possibility, how you discover what’s already been tried, how you calibrate your own sentences against the living archive. Then he twists the knife. “More information” isn’t just more books; it’s the whole anxious appetite to be prepared, to have permission, to know enough before you begin. Puig frames that appetite as “an inhibitor,” a subtle form of procrastination disguised as craft.
The subtext is anti-purist and anti-credential. Puig, who built novels out of movie melodrama, gossip, popular songs, and political dread, understood that originality often comes from misreading, from stealing shamelessly, from writing ahead of your understanding. Too much reverent study can trap you inside other people’s solutions, or worse, inside the fear of repeating them. The mind starts drafting rebuttals to imagined critics instead of drafting scenes.
Context matters: Puig wrote from the margins of Latin American “serious literature,” wary of gatekeepers and canonical gravity, and he lived through censorship, exile, and the pressure to justify aesthetic choices. His warning lands as a defense of momentum. Read to expand your range, yes - but don’t let research become a moral alibi. At some point, the only information that matters is what the page forces out of you.
The subtext is anti-purist and anti-credential. Puig, who built novels out of movie melodrama, gossip, popular songs, and political dread, understood that originality often comes from misreading, from stealing shamelessly, from writing ahead of your understanding. Too much reverent study can trap you inside other people’s solutions, or worse, inside the fear of repeating them. The mind starts drafting rebuttals to imagined critics instead of drafting scenes.
Context matters: Puig wrote from the margins of Latin American “serious literature,” wary of gatekeepers and canonical gravity, and he lived through censorship, exile, and the pressure to justify aesthetic choices. His warning lands as a defense of momentum. Read to expand your range, yes - but don’t let research become a moral alibi. At some point, the only information that matters is what the page forces out of you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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