I read fast. I always have. I finished the seventh Harry Potter book in five hours. I can blow through a 250-page book in one night if it’s compelling enough (or if I can’t sleep). It always made teachers think I hadn’t been paying attention while reading, or that I hadn’t done the reading in the first place, because I got done with it so quickly. When I was a writing tutor I was in high demand for long assignments because I could read and process them without taking too much time.

One of my creative writing professors once said that the more you read the faster you read, because your eyes recognize the shape of the word instead of reading the word itself, which is why fast readers will sometimes get to the bottom of a page and then go back to the top — because their brain finally registers what they read and wants to see it again. It’s also why serif fonts (the ones with little thingies at the edges of letters, such as the one on this blog) get read faster — the serifs drag your eyes from letter to letter. Or so I’m told. And, finally, it’s why books tend to all be in the same few fonts — so that readers’ eyes don’t get confused or distracted by something new and they can focus on the words themselves.

I’m not the only fast reader out there, though. I was checking my Amazon stats the week before last and in one day someone read 203 pages of Lessons. That’s basically the entire book. Later that week, my count for Training the Trainer went from 0 to 236 — again, the entire book in one day. I mean, I’m sure it’s possible several people read the book at the same time, but it’s more likely, given my usual readership stats, that it was just one person reading the whole book in one go. That’s very gratifying, to see someone so engrossed in one of my stories that they read the whole thing all at once. It’s what I’m looking for when I write: to write things that catch people’s attention and make them feel feelings. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.

Oh, and one other nice thing about fast readers — if they come across something they don’t like, they don’t waste a ton of time on it. I can’t tell you how many bad (or just trope-ridden and formulaic) sci-fi and fantasy novels I’ve started on Kindle Unlimited and quit after one or two chapters. If I remember right, one night I went through more than a half dozen books on my list before I finally found one that caught my attention.

One more thing — I don’t consider myself a speed reader. Speed reading is a skill that can be learned and practiced. I’m a fast reader — there’s no talent or technique to it; it’s just the way my brain processes the written word.