I guess that means no, eh?
Can you be a writer that also isn't an avid reader?
- Thread starter Generic Human
- Start date
I guess that means no, eh?
What I'm struggling to understand is why any writer would resist reading.
I think reading for me as an adult was the best thing for my writing.
When i was growing up, i read a lot... but all the books i read either had animal protagonists or white (with a few POC characters sprinkled in but always in a "less than" capacity.... like, a book written by a white woman about a slave girl... and a book written by a white woman about a chinese girl who was abandoned).
I hadnt read a book where a POC was a hero or went on fantastic adventures.
Thats not to say they werent there... but until recently, books by minorities or featuring minorities in a prominent capacity were not displayed at book stores and in libraries. You either had to ask for them or look for them. And me as a kid, didnt know to look for them. I just read what was on face out display and what everyone else was reading at the time (fun fact... B&N up until fairly recently only did big displays or face out displays for books that publishers paid them to promote.... and publishers often put the bulk of their promotion into sellable authors. Sellable authors were rarely minorities).
Anyways... my stories growing up were all white protagonists. White pritagonists went on adventures. White protagonists knew magic. White characters lived in tolkien-esque worlds. White protagonists knew vampires and werewolves. Etc.
So my characters were white.
Minority characters had too much trauma and werent "fun" (beloved, ribbons, absolutely true diaries of a part time indian)
Then i started working in libraries and saw all the amazing books by minority authors with minority characters. SFF books and atarted reading more and my writing changed. My characters went from being either white or ambiguous to POC.
I thought i was the only one.... but i attended an author talk where horror author Tananarive Due essentually said the same thing. That until college, the lack of exposure to black books and characters impacted her writing because she never saw black people in the her required reading.
When i was growing up, i read a lot... but all the books i read either had animal protagonists or white (with a few POC characters sprinkled in but always in a "less than" capacity.... like, a book written by a white woman about a slave girl... and a book written by a white woman about a chinese girl who was abandoned).
I hadnt read a book where a POC was a hero or went on fantastic adventures.
Thats not to say they werent there... but until recently, books by minorities or featuring minorities in a prominent capacity were not displayed at book stores and in libraries. You either had to ask for them or look for them. And me as a kid, didnt know to look for them. I just read what was on face out display and what everyone else was reading at the time (fun fact... B&N up until fairly recently only did big displays or face out displays for books that publishers paid them to promote.... and publishers often put the bulk of their promotion into sellable authors. Sellable authors were rarely minorities).
Anyways... my stories growing up were all white protagonists. White pritagonists went on adventures. White protagonists knew magic. White characters lived in tolkien-esque worlds. White protagonists knew vampires and werewolves. Etc.
So my characters were white.
Minority characters had too much trauma and werent "fun" (beloved, ribbons, absolutely true diaries of a part time indian)
Then i started working in libraries and saw all the amazing books by minority authors with minority characters. SFF books and atarted reading more and my writing changed. My characters went from being either white or ambiguous to POC.
I thought i was the only one.... but i attended an author talk where horror author Tananarive Due essentually said the same thing. That until college, the lack of exposure to black books and characters impacted her writing because she never saw black people in the her required reading.
In my genre (historical fiction), it's impossible to be a writer without also reading a lot ... not if you want your stories to make sense, of course. 
But it doesn't matter what your genre is, I think; the more you read, the more you'll see how characters of different backgrounds talk or dress, what they eat, how they behave in different social situations, and so on.
So yes, I'm an avid reader. I also used to read a lot of Ovid. I was an avid Ovid reader.
But it doesn't matter what your genre is, I think; the more you read, the more you'll see how characters of different backgrounds talk or dress, what they eat, how they behave in different social situations, and so on.
So yes, I'm an avid reader. I also used to read a lot of Ovid. I was an avid Ovid reader.
Gosh, sit on the fence, why dontcha?
But I agree. It's very difficult to develop your skills in a vacuum, and without seeing how other people do it. Sure, you can rely on feedback, but to be valuable, that feedback will usually come from people who are readers - and that means you're effectively reading by proxy. A lot more efficient to read it yourself.
sianablackwood
New Member
I would say yes to reading in general, and for a variety of reasons - skill development, research, and also just for fun.
I'm not comfortable putting an amount of time as a requirement, though. I think it's more about the level of interest in stories and how they're put together - but that's something that can't really be quantified.
I'm not comfortable putting an amount of time as a requirement, though. I think it's more about the level of interest in stories and how they're put together - but that's something that can't really be quantified.
No, nope, unlikely. You can't do unto other what hasn't been done unto you. When all said and done, emotive prompt that spur reader to react and therefore continue on reading and (hopefully) engaging most, if not all, piece of creative writing is both context based and subjective. And you can't spawn that in any piece of writing unless you'd gone through the whole thing yourself due to its experiential nature.
Dante Dases
New Member
Absolutely. You could read for four hours a day, every day, and still not be able to produce a single sentence of note. Writing and reading must go together. Practice writing alongside consistently reading. Stephen King's summation remains the best: If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.
Let's say I want to produce a regency romance. I'm a reasonably proficient writer. I can string together 80,000 words in a coherent story easily enough (allowing for the fact that writing is hard and an 80,000 word novel is a colossal achievement). I have no doubt that I could write such a story based upon my own knowledge of the time, my understanding of social mores, the history of the time (might have to do a bit of research there; the early C19th is a weaker spot of mine), and my ability to put one coherent word after another. All of that is based upon my writing abilities, having practiced putting one word after another thousands upon thousands of times. But would I be able to capture the flavour? I may want to break clear of the tropes of that genre, but without having read examples of the genre could I identify the pitfalls to avoid? Would I be able to operate convincingly within the conventions of that kind of story without having a real grasp of what they were?
I could always look at Wikipedia or some such. 'Oh, it says do this, don't do this, don't do this.' But that theoretical knowledge isn't the same as seeing it done. Some people may be able to produce good writing without having read extensively, but I truly believe they are few and far between. But an avid reader will not just be able to write without putting in practice. The two must go together. One informs the other.
I can confirm Dante Dases's post. Hitherto, I've written novels based in antiquity - think Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon and all that crowd.
So I set myself a challenge ... and have spent the last two years (!) in Development Hell, aka Iceland in the year 1,000 AD ... because it sounded cool, and I've read a few books about it, so I naively thought I could do it. (I still can, and still am, but it's taking much longer than before).
Moral: don't think everything is going to be easy.
So I set myself a challenge ... and have spent the last two years (!) in Development Hell, aka Iceland in the year 1,000 AD ... because it sounded cool, and I've read a few books about it, so I naively thought I could do it. (I still can, and still am, but it's taking much longer than before).
Moral: don't think everything is going to be easy.
.. I'd love to make a short about such a topic.
To the OP, Asking if a writer can be good at the craft, without being an avid reader, seems to me like asking if a baker can be a good cook without an oven.
I think the argument can be made that a writer should read more than they write
Similar threads
