To most people, reading is one of life’s pleasures, a relaxing escape from the pressures of life, but to the writer, it’s something to be taken more seriously.
It’s a valuable and indispensable tool to their craft, an essential practice to improve with words, and if one is serious about their writing, they should be putting in the reading time.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
– Stephen King
Practicing writing to get better makes logical sense – after all, how can you hope to get better at your craft without practice?
But why read a lot? Can’t we just keep on going with our writing and leave it at that? After all, reading is time consuming, and life gets really busy, right?
Wrong.
Life can indeed get really hectic, but if you want to be a good writer, you MUST OPEN THAT BOOK AND MAKE THE TIME TO READ. I’ll outline now all the points as to why reading is absolutely essential to the serious writer.
Reading teaches you to be a better writer
Reading creates a sense of familiarity with the writing process. A good book teaches you about things such as style, narration, character creation, pacing, plot development, dialogue, and description.
With a good novel, we get to experience great writing and what can truly be achieved. It can inspire us to create better things. We also get to experience different writing styles and techniques, and get a sense of what works and what doesn’t work and why, and our knowledge only keeps growing the more we read.
Even the average and rotten book has something to teach us – it helps us to recognise poor writing, and thus we are able to steer clear of it in our own work.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
– George R.R. Martin
Reading expands your vocabulary and improves your language skills
The more you read, the wider your vocabulary will be. You will also gain a better understanding of language in general and how to apply it.
Reading gives you inspiration and ideas
Writing is very limited if you only rely on yourself for inspiration. After all, an individual only has a limited amount of knowledge, ideas, and experiences to draw on. However if you read, you have an opportunity to jump into and experience the wonder of many minds. You tap into a vast well of ideas, knowledge and experience, which is a thousand times more stimulating than just relying on yourself.
UGLY WORD OF THE DAY: BROBDINGNAGIAN. Meaning very large. It originated from an island Jonathan Swift called Brobdingnag in the fictional book Gulliver’s Travels, where everything existed on a large scale. The islanders there were also known as Brobdingnagians.
Reading gives you knowledge
Reading gives you endless knowledge to draw on, both in non-fiction and fiction. This is great for research, as getting the facts right gives your writing realism and depth. Learning new stuff expands and enriches you and also happens to be very good for your brain (it helps if it’s interesting).
Reading teaches you about your chosen genre
Reading helps you get familiar with your chosen genre and learn what readers may expect from it. It’s wise to read outside your genre too – the reason being is that you may discover useful tips not found so much elsewhere. For example, you may learn about pacing more by reading a thriller novel and get valuable tips about applying sexual tension into your novel by reading a romance. Even biographies can be inspiring and give you great ideas, as truth, as they say, can be a lot weirder than fiction.
Reading teaches you to concentrate and be alone with your thoughts
Writing is an isolating activity, and one has to learn to be comfortable being alone with their thoughts for long stretches of time, and to be able to concentrate. When you read, you are practicing these skills. Being lost in a good book can be a meditative experience, as you can get lost in another world for a time.
YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE: The Call of the Wild by Jack London. Set in Canada during a gold rush, a pampered household dog named Buck is stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. As he struggles to adjust to a new harsher reality and fights for survival, he transforms as his wild instincts begin to emerge.
My experiences with reading
I’ve always been an avid book reader, but before my novella I was mostly into non-fiction. Then I kept hearing of the importance of writers reading in their chosen genre, so I started reading more fiction in the hopes of improving my own work.
It opened up a whole new world of experiences for me, and pretty soon I was thinking, ‘what have I been missing out on, this is fantastic!’
Experiencing the creativity of others also encouraged me to be bolder and take more risk in my own writing.
The seduction of social media
In the last two years or so, I unfortunately got sucked in to the charms of social media. So much to watch, so little time. As a result, I’ve noticed that my reading time has decreased a lot, which has been disappointing. I’m currently working on being a bit more balanced – of not being so obsessed with social media and reading more. I’ve managed to cut down a bit. I’m still working on cutting down a lot more so I can get in more reading time. How surprisingly easy it is to sink into that rabbit-hole! Let’s all continue to fight to not fall into it.
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P.S. NOTES FROM THE DESK: talking about books, I thought I’d share a picture of a street library with you from my neighbourhood. It’s totally for free and the idea is to take a book and leave a book in its place. I like this miniature library, I think it’s really cute.
