You Can't Write Well Unless You Read Well

My writing mentor taught be that writers needed to practice two habits:

Journal every day.

Find reading that you adore.

You can’t write if you don’t love reading. You can’t learn the toolswithout a pile of books on your bedside table. Trying to write without an appreciation for writers is like trying to ride a bike without a road. Every book has a thousand lessons to teach you. How do story mechanics work? What’s the point of a line break? Does that punctuation mark really add anything to the work? What can metaphors really do for me, and what’s the difference between a clichéd idiom and an original one?

Only books can answer those questions in meaningful ways.

The moment you lose your passion for reading, the inspiration will vanish from your writing. This is a skill you can only practice if you have a particular state of mind. Maintaining it is the hardest challenge I’ve ever confronted as a writer. I wrestle with it every day of my life.

Do you know what cures it?

Reading.

I read every niche that I write. Non-fiction... poetry... satire... all of it. So should you.

If you’re writing five pages of content a week but only reading one, your work will become unbalanced, and your talent will begin to leak from your pen. You will become trapped in your current abilities. You’ll over-use your tools and start coughing out clichés. You will be in stasis.

T.S. Elliot said it can take two years to write just one poem. Several magical states of being need to arise simultaneously for a poem to happen, and it could take months for them to coincide. That’s not a practical timeline for any writer. You’re not going to make a career with a poem a year, so you’ve got to force those states of mind to arise artificially.

That’s why you’ve got to read.