Reading will not make you a better writer.

Beginner writers are told to read, read, read, read, read, and read, because reading will make them better writers. Is this the right approach to writing?

In this article:

• Reading is important. However, too many writers spend their productive time reading when they should be writing. While you should read as much as you can, as a writer, you should also write.

• Where did it go wrong? A deeper dive into the logical fallacy that commands aspiring writers to spend all day reading.

Reading, by itself, will not make you a better writer.

Let me get something out of the way: I read a lot. Each week, I read about 100,000 words for enjoyment. Half of these words are narrative nonfiction. The other half fiction. I never force myself to read, and I never read for the sake of reading, only for enjoyment.

I’ve been reading an average of two books a week since early childhood. In junior high and high school, it was closer to a book a day. One hundred thousand words a week, fifty two weeks a year, fifteen years of childhood. I’ve read, by conservative estimate, 78 million words (!!) before I wrote my first story.

Despite my extensive history of reading, my first written works were utter trash 🗑️. I didn’t know anything about writing believable characters, crafting engaging conflict, or where to begin and end a scene. I couldn’t string together a clear description. I didn’t even know where to put the comma in a line of dialogue.

It took two years of diligent practice before I wrote my first good short story. Writing my first novel was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Every step of my writing journey felt like I was an infant learning how to walk for the first time. That is to say, frustrating, helpless, and impossibly slow.

All those years of reading did not make me a better writer. If reading created good writers, I should’ve hit the ground running. If it anyone could learn the art of writing from reading, it should’ve been me and my 78 million words.

But I wasn’t automatically talented. I was trash.

As I wrote more and more, I became less and less trash. Writing every day made me a better writer. Studying the techniques of prose and story made me a better writer. Conscious, diligent practice made me a better writer. Growing a thick skin in the face of scathing feedback made me a better writer.

“But Stephen King said a writer must read!” you say. “And Cormac McCarthy said books are made from books! And Hemingway read voraciously, often reading four books at a time! Who are you to tell me these giants are wrong?”

These literary giants aren’t wrong. It’s the common wisdom gleamed from their words that is wrong.

Common wisdom: Reading makes you a better writer.

In actuality: Reading is a necessary but not sufficient part of the learning process to become a better writer.

All skills are honed through practice. Practice means doing the thing you’re trying to become skilled at. For a basketball player, practice is shooting a hundred hoops a day, not watching a hundred basketball games. For a bassoonist, practice is playing scales and etudes, not listening to chamber music.

If you want to learn driving, you drive. No amount of sitting in the passenger’s seat will help you pass the driving exam.

Likewise, if all you do is read, you will never be a good writer. A writer practices by writing, not reading.

I’m not saying reading is useless!

Reading good fiction is absolutely necessary if you want to write good fiction, but only if you already have the foundational skills as a writer. You need to know how to construct a sentence before reading McCarthy’s rhythmic polysyndetons will help you write more lyrically. You need to know the basics of character arcs and narrative structure before you can absorb GRRM’s complex plots into your own technique.

You need to know how to write before reading books can help you write better.

As a reader, you read to enjoy the story. A skilled writer renders the words as invisible carriers of the story. The reader is blissfully unaware of the way the characters are described, the way the dialogue is written, and the way the scenes are weaved together.

On the other hand, if you are a writer with some knowledge of the craft, you will unconsciously absorb elements of the writer’s technique as you read. You can’t help but to notice that the writer focused on Sally’s red dress. You can’t help but to notice the writer’s choice of starting point and the writer’s use of rhythm. You can’t help but to notice that this writer likes to use groups of three for emphasis.

Learn to write. Then, learn to read like a writer. Then, read as much as you can.

Where did the bad logic come from?

Part of the “reading makes you a better writer” misunderstanding comes from our natural tendency to be lazy, because while writing is hard as hell for everyone, reading is easy. When we hear a great writer like Stephen King talk about the necessity of reading, we want to believe that the secret writing well is something as effortless as reading a book.

The other part is a logical fallacy called “affirming the consequent”.

To demonstrate this fallacy, suppose I make the claim that “proper brushing prevents cavities”. From this claim, I can conclude only two things: 1) if Bobby brushes properly, he doesn’t have cavities, and 2) if Bobby has cavities, he didn’t brush properly.

If you told me Bobby didn’t brush properly, I cannot conclude he has cavities. Maybe his diet is really clean and sugar-free. Likewise, if you told me Bobby doesn’t have cavities, I cannot conclude he brushed properly. Maybe he doesn’t even have teeth! Both of these assumptions are fallacies, given the original claim.

Many well-known writers have said something along the lines of, “if you don’t read, you won’t write well.” The only thing we can infer from this claim is: “if you write well, you read.”

We cannot infer the converse, or “if you read, you will write well”. In fact, we cannot infer anything about reading from the original statement, because the statement is about writing well.

Here’s another way to think about it:

Even if all good writers are voracious readers, most voracious readers are still not good writers. It is unreasonable to assume you will become a good writer by reading, when hundreds of millions of people read every day without ever learning how to write.