If You Don’t Read, You Can’t Write

Reading is seriously one of the best things you can do for your writing career. I run into the occasional person who really doesn’t understand why reading should make a difference in how well you write, but I feel like it makes all the difference. Reading good books is what teaches me how to write well.

Sometimes, I’ll read a badly written book, and feel like I can’t write well all of a sudden, so I’ll have to read part of a well-written book in order to be able to write again.

Why do I come across badly written books sometimes? Because the authors of those books probably didn’t read enough. I started reading one book today that was written too terribly for words. At first, the bad writing was bearable, but then it became evident that the author had probably not gone back through it at any point or had any beta readers do so. At one point, some dialogue jumped from “the old woman said” to “Agatha said”, before the old woman had even introduced herself as Agatha. And of course, the worst part was the phrase “her brain blinked at his choice of weapon.” Um, no. Brains do not blink. Perhaps, if the author of that book read more books, they would have been able to better describe what they meant.