SKF NOTE: As interesting as it was swapping stories in person and through letters with Neil Peart about drummers, drums, and drumming; sharing stories about writing and writers was equally enjoyable and informative.

Neil read all the time. He may have said so in one of his letters – I would have to check – but my impression from our conversations is that Neil read for these reasons:

• To learn to write
• For enjoyment
• For self-education
• To reach a goal of reading the world’s great literature

Those reasons aren’t unique to Neil. All serious writers can identify with them. And you could substitute any other art form – music, dance, sculpture – for writing and those reasons remain universal.

Neil’s letters on writers and writing usually made me feel like a slug. How could he read so many books, by so many different authors, so thoroughly, in such a seemingly short amount of time?

What was my problem?

Here’s Neil talking about writing in a segment of a letter he wrote in Toronto, March 22, 1988. Originally, Neil’s letter excerpt was written as one paragraph. I’ve divided Neil’s paragraph into seven paragraphs for easier reading.

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March 22, 1988
Toronto

Reading wise, I’ve been into almost all non-fiction lately: history, biography, a book on the human body, and travel books. All in keeping with my new taste in non-fiction writing I suppose.

In line with that, I was so impressed by a work by Truman Capote, a collection of shorter pieces called Music For Chameleons.

I had read and loved Breakfast At Tiffany’s and the short pieces that are included in that volume, but in this one he talks in the preface about what he calls the “non-fiction novel”, referring to the experiment of In Cold Blood.

That idea, of presenting a true story, journalism, in the form of a narrative, refined carefully and beautifully as if it were a novel. I too could get very into that idea.

He remarked that Norman Mailer had criticized this concept when Capote first expounded it, calling it a “failure of imagination,” but of course later went on to work in the same genre, stuff like The Executioner’s Song.

Capote writes cattily that he’s “always glad to do Mr. Mailer a favor”! Bitch.

But I highly recommend that collection, it’s really beautifully done, and the Breakfast At Tiffany’s collection too if you haven’t read it yet.