I regularly come into contact with other writers. Sometimes this simply means scrolling through the Writing subreddit for a few minutes before going back to work. Sometimes this means actually having an in-depth conversation with another author in real life.
After all those years a pattern crystallized: almost all aspiring or “newbie” authors do not read books.
As you might expect, this surprises me every time. As it surprises the many frustrated or baffled commenters on social media like Reddit. How could you love stories, but never actually consume one? How could you pour hours, weeks, months into writing your own book—but never even consider reading one!?
And it shows in their writing. Their excerpts, snippets, and comments are usually badly formatted, hard to follow, or almost a 100% copy of some famous work. Their biggest insecurity is the fact that they are afraid any of their ideas is “not allowed” or “not done” (because they don’t read enough books to see what’s possible), and their biggest flaw is the fact that their writing is monotone and formulaic (because they have not consumed a diverse story diet).
Then … I remember that I was once like them.
As a young boy I taught myself how to read, which allowed me to skip some classes afterwards. I devoured books left and right—until I suddenly stopped. The moment I went to high school, all my reading dropped to a big fat zero. As I wrote my first few books (and Saga of Life short stories!), as I dreamed of becoming a big author, I never read anything ever again. I didn’t even read the books assigned to me by school, even though this made my grades (for Dutch, my native language, and English) plummet. It would take until the second year of university before I hesitantly picked up a book again.
What happened here? What went wrong? Why is this the story of so many (early) language enthusiasts and budding writers?
After all these years, reading and writing nearly a hundred books, I hoped to share some insights.
Issue 1: School
We all know it, yet we don’t change anything. Our systems of education are the death of actual creativity, growth and learning. This is, unfortunately, true for most of the developed world, as they more or less follow the same ill-advised systems.
This is the cycle that we all go through.
- Reading is fun! Stories are cool! I want to write stories too!
- Oh, school says I can’t read book X. I must read book Y instead.
- Book Y is boring and stupid.
- Oh, I need to write an essay about book Y too. Analyzing a book you just read following strict questions and definitions is boring and stupid.
- Ugh, I hate books. They’re boring and stupid.
- I stop reading (for fun).
It’s disheartening to see this happen again and again. It happened to my younger siblings too. They were inventing stories, writing, reading, having fun with it, and then school came along—usually this switch becomes prominent when high school starts—and they started hating books. And many of them never really picked on up ever again.
Reading takes effort, there’s no denying that. It’s easier to just plop onto your sofa and put on a Netflix show. Most people still crave stories and entertainment, so they default to that.
But, as is so often the case, effort is rewarded. Reading strengthens your linguistic abilities, your imagination, your connection to the story. Books can do things that visual media can’t, or can do them much more easily or cheaply.
So, how do we solve this? In the first place it’s a more general problem of laziness. Or, rather, the fact that so many people do not learn that putting in effort is rewarded. In fact, school is also very good at forcing you to do a lot of work without actually rewarding you. And so it becomes very hard to convince someone to start reading books again. Because they immediately feel that the effort of sitting down and actively reading letters on a page just isn’t worth it.
Secondly, our systems of education need a major change. Tell children to read books they like. Help them find those fun books. It’s as simple as that. Don’t force them to read what they don’t want, don’t force them to coldly disect the book until the story dies in the process.
A great initiative I recently learned about, for example, is one that takes those stories and turns them into general games or escape room experiences. This works best for mystery-based stories, of course. But I truly feel that it’s possible to make any written story more interesting by thinking a bit more outside of the box. And that the important part is that people keep reading, as opposed to getting all their reading from specific books.
Thirdly, I’ve always advocated for guarding yourself against the evils of school. It, unfortunately, takes a conscious effort to not let (at least) 18 years of terrible practices ruin your ability to pursue interests and find joy in hobbies. This was the first thing that helped me get back into reading. I told myself to “just have fun” reading a book. I shoved away any thoughts of having to pick “literature” or “proper books”, any thoughts of having to write some formal review of them, and just looked at the first page of several books until one grabbed me.
Since then, I’ve read many books that are considered “garbage” by authors and readers alike, or books considered only for (young) children—while I am a 28 year old man. And I’ve had a lot of fun with those books.
If you want to become a (successful) writer but never read any books, consider my words. Consider if it was school that made you hate books/reading, and put in a conscious effort to ignore that and read just for fun again.
Issue 2: The Success-Based Society
Now more than ever, people are shepherded into a life based on career, income and personal success. Young kids are already told they must do whatever school asks of them so they can get a degree and a high-paying job later. If you show any inkling of talent or passion for something, all adults around you pounce on it. Your parents either say “There’s no money in writing, stop pursuing it” or they say “Have you thought about selling your work? How about you write another book and we try to sell it?”
Despite having quite creative and liberal parents myself, I was still subjected to this phenomenon my entire childhood. Every creative pursuit I tried had to receive a plan for becoming successful and getting income from it. Every time I wrote a story, my parents didn’t read it, but they did start talking about approaching a publisher or doing a bit in the local newspaper or whatever.
What’s the result of this? You stop enjoying writing just for the act, and start thinking of it like a job or a “must”. Similarly, you stop reading books for fun and enrichment, and start seeing them as “market research” and the like.
Numerous studies have shown how this kind of thinking kills creativity and intrinsic motivation. And creative people are, usually, not at all motivated by money or success in the first place. So once they’ve lost intrinsic motivation to read/write … they’re not getting any extrinsic motivation in return to carry on. It all just … ends.
I remember a specific tipping point, for myself, when I was around 10 years old. Our task in school this afternoon had literally been to “write a story, any story”. As expected, I easily filled an entire notebook with some fantastical adventure, based on all the books I’d been reading. (Narnia, Harry Potter, etcetera.) Most of the other children barely filled a single page with some haphazard sentences.
The teacher noticed. She complimented me and told me to write the sequel for this story. A specific “assignment” just for me, because she was impressed and wanted to see me grow that ability.
You probably guessed what happened next. The teacher suddenly expected success from me and set a deadline. My parents were also like “you should become a writer, you should try to turn this into a book, you could make money from this!”
I never wrote the sequel. I wrote and read far less after that.
Some people are immune to this pressure. Some are actually quite motivated by success or getting rich from a bestseller, which is great for them, but we’re not talking about them in this article.
We’re talking about the vast majority of people who’d love to be a writer … but have been told that they need a succesful, money-making book right now!
These people see reading books as a waste of time. If they’re reading, they’re not producing. If they’re reading, they’re not actively making something that might make money or market them.
Even writing the book is often seen as an annoying step in the process! So many people come to these fora, or to me, and are like “I really want to write a book—so, erm, do you have any ideas or, you know, complete outlines?”
It’s all so goal-oriented. The act of writing a book is reduced to the dream of releasing that book and being successful. Most writers nowadays want to skip the actual writing and go straight to having accomplished the goal (successfully).
Even now—after finishing so many books—I get these same responses. Oh, how much money does it make? Oh, are people buying it? Oh, so your goal is to write a best-seller? (And when they learn that no, I don’t sell that much, they immediately turn into a sad face and sometimes quite literally say I should give it up and try an actual job.)
This realization was the second thing that got me reading again. I don’t actually care about success or reaching some specific goal. All of that has been put onto me, taught to me, forced into my head from a young age. For years, I thought of writing (or any of my creative pursuits) as “so how do I become successful/make money with this as quickly as possible?” A step like “read some books” never fits in a mind-set like that. So you stop reading books, despite writing them and wanting to become a better writer.
So, how do we solve this? By being able to recognize this. And then to change your mind-set to just enjoying doing stuff. Enjoy the writing process; also enjoy reading books. Stop thinking of your life as nothing but the most efficient path to reaching some specific goal or notion of “success”.
You know, the doing IS the goal of life. The writing is what makes writing worthwhile. The getting lost in a great book someone else wrote is what gets you excited to write again.
The fact that just doing lots of stuff, every day, makes you better and better at your craft too is really just a nice byproduct.
More specifically, if you’re an amateur writer who wants to read more books, try something like this.
- If you can set goals like “I want to write a book”, then you can also set goals like “I want to read a book”
- You can make up specific rules such as “for every chapter I write, I also read one chapter from another book”. (And this can go both ways: if you find yourself really enjoying a book and reading deep into the night … well, then you have a lot of writing to catch up to the coming days :p)
- Once you’re used to enjoying stories like this again, you can slowly let go of this “goal-oriented approach”. You can see reading books as just something fun to do. You can think about the writing, instead of how successful you want that finished product to be.
It’s fine to dream or to have ambition. The issue is that this goes far beyond that, to a learned state of “must succeed, must have good career, must reach goal” that definitely does more harm than good.
I simply hope aspiring writers stop asking questions about how to best market their book or how much money to accept … before they’ve actually written any book at all :p
Is reading really that important?
Yes. A thousand times yes.
The first step to becoming a good writer is to write a lot, of course. I got quite far on that alone. My early Saga of Life stories, for example, were pretty terrible. But they were actually readable, with proper sentences, chapter breaks, a general arc and some funny jokes that landed, etcetera. Simply writing a lot made my writing at least passable.
But the second step is absolutely to read a lot. Read both good and bad books. Read things inside and outside your comfort zone. Read for different reasons, with different perspectives going into a book. As stated, I’d even count reading the newspaper, or reading lots of text for a game or escape room, and other forms of written stories.
It teaches you new words and phrasings. It teaches you new general story structures, what you think works and what you think doesn’t work. It shows you all that is possible, allowing you to more easily experiment and go for wacky ideas yourself. It inspires you. You—consciously or not—copy some of the best habits of that writer, some turns of phrase from that other writing style, and over time this blends into your unique writing style and perspective on stories. All of which is built on pages and pages of experience with story and what it made you fell.
If you go back into my history of published writing, you can clearly see the effects of this. Unfortunately, my first stories were all Dutch, so if you only look at English works you don’t really see the whole picture!
But the effect was as follows.
- The moment I started reading again, my pace of writing also picked up. (From “one short story once in a while” to “multiple planned and finished books per year”.)
- Any time I read a new author or series, you could see one or two things slipping into my next book.
- Example: reading my first Brandon Sanderson book suddenly made me think more deeply about magic systems and how to use them in my next fantasy stories.
- Example: reading the A Series of Unfortunate Events books made me realize that you can simply … literally explain complicated words to young readers, as long as you do it in a fun and narratively fitting way. I never even considered that before! Because I had never seen it in any book!
- Example: reading my first Discworld book suddenly made me realize I was being far too serious and grim and that a more silly and humorous writing style actually fit me much better. Basically, I solved the issue of “my stories aren’t flowing and I don’t like them” not by reading a book on How To Write or editing stories a thousand times, but by simply reading a new book and realizing I was just using the wrong writing style for my brain.
- My first few stories were heavily edited in ways that are “learnable”. Proper grammar. Shorter sentences. Active voice. More paragraph breaks. They used very simple language, and could be understood, but didn’t do anything creative or flow really well.
- Once I had a few years of reading under my belt (… again), my stories started flowing much more. I could put thoughts to paper more easily, in sentences of varying lengths and phrasings, and it all just flowed easily.
- I distinctly remember writing a story in a haze (late at night, I was tired, but I had personal deadlines to keep), thinking it was hot garbage. Then, after a long time in which I only read but did not write, I returned to the story and was pleasantly surprised about how professional and fluid the writing leapt off the page.
The positive effects on my writing quality and enjoyment cannot be overstated. Reading a few chapters every night, before going to bed, caused such massive improvements that I haven’t skipped a single night in ~10 years. Sure, some nights I only read a few pages because I am just too tired and it’s too late. But I never not read. It’s far too valuable a habit to stop.
It’s also hard to quantify, though, which is a third (smaller) reason many writers don’t read that much. I made an attempt to quantify the positive effects with my list above, but it’s still only a small part of the story. Reading books will not make your next book a guaranteed best-seller, of course not. It will not make you write 10,000 words a day all of a sudden, all of them perfect. The improvement in skill is far less tangible and less direct. That “fluidity” of “flow” in writing and storytelling is really the best way I can put it. A kind of “you know it when you see it”-deal.
Give me a paragraph written by someone who reads books (a lot), and one by someone who merely writes (a lot), and I think I can easily pick out the avid reader because of the much stronger style and flow.
The effects of reading a lot aren’t easily quantifiable. But they’re certainly there, and it makes me confidently say that yes, any writer would do well to read as much as they write.
Don’t pay for expensive lectures on writing, or read a thousand books with writing tips. Or, at least, don’t make that your first instinct. Try to read more (diverse) books first, and see what it gets you after 3–6 months.
And now I hope aspiring writers can stop asking questions like “is this possible in a story?” and “am I allowed to do X in a story?” Instead, spend that time reading some books that you like, and you’ll see that yes, everything is possible, as long as you do it well. Any story can be told and twisted in countless ways. Any information can be phrased and communicated in countless ways. And you’ll experience them all, and use that to grow your unique voice and story instinct, by reading a lot of books.
Conclusion
Most writers nowadays, especially aspiring or newbie authors, seem adverse to reading books at all. Which is bad, because reading is good for you in general, but especially because reading many (diverse) books is probably the best way to actually write more and higher quality books. It’s also surprising, because if you love stories so much, why are you not engaging with them at all?
I have, unfortunately, seen how schools quite effectively kill any excitement for reading. Most children read while in elementary school; and most quit while in high school. Whatever the case, they rarely—if ever—return to reading when they’re older.
A second reason, in my view, is our current society that is very goal-oriented and ego-oriented. We are indoctrinated with the idea of having found success, or getting rich, so much so that we want to completely skip the actual process and only show off a successful end product. We don’t want to see other people writing good stories—no no, we want our name on the cover of our book. If you combine those two things, you get a lot of people who say they “want to be a writer” who actually just “want to have written a book”. Many authors who never read and, sometimes, never write.
Writing is hard. The actual process is hard, it takes years and years to hone the skill, and finishing a single book can take months or years. It can be quite lonely and taxing on the brain. (On writing days, I fall asleep almost instantly. On days when I worked just as hard, but I’ve been drawing, or programming, or anything else, it takes much longer to fall asleep.)
And so it is understandable to want a shortcut. To want instant gratification, efficiency, and do away with anything else. To view reading books—especially those you know are bad, or that you’re not going to like, or that are outside of your genre—as a waste of time. It’s not directly getting you closer to personal success, so why even contemplate it?
But it is my experience that reading a lot of books is absolutely the best thing you can do to become a better writer. See the many arguments, examples and anecdotes given in this post.
Just as it is my experience that there is a book/story to enjoy for everyone. This is perhaps a positive note to end on, because I have seen this happen before my very eyes several times too. Someone who never reads, who scoffs at books or letters on a page in general, who just “happened” to see work of mine lying open on the table, and is now “oopsie I’m at page 150”.
But it’s the enjoyment that counts. The reading for the reading, not any goal or instant reward. If we can simply offer people (mostly young children/teenagers) loads of books and let them pick the one that interests them, we’d all be voracious readers before long.
I hope aspiring writers take that message to heart.
Anyway, those were my thoughts on this issue. As always, the article became way too long and I must now do the tasks I actually planned to do today.
Tiamo