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Hello fellow writers. I appear to you out of the mist, a bringer of chaos—hence the provocative title. @Shannon and I have written this piece together (@Shannon: actually she did most of it), and we hold firmly to our opinions. (@Shannon: so good luck trying to un-convince us).

One piece of writing advice you hear a lot in the writing world is that in order to be a good writer, you must read as much as possible. If you aren’t reading one book after the other in a reasonable fashion, then your writing will majorly suffer. After all, doing this you will see examples of well-written books and badly-written books, right?

This advice sounds good, yet it is very shallow, is almost never qualified, and I fundamentally disagree with it.

Fight me 😀

So here we go. The biggest problem I have with this advice is this: it does not take into account where you are in your writing journey.

Everyone is at a different level.

–  If you are a new writer, still trying to understand the writing craft, then researching how to write is very important. This includes reading a range of books and analyzing them to figure out why some work and some don’t, why some writing is better than others, and the science behind story, theme, and character arcs.
– So if you are just starting your writing journey or are relatively new, I do suggest giving some of your time to reading, as well as the craft of good story science and the art of sentences.

However.

At some point in your writing journey, once you have studied the Craft for a while, reading in order to analyze and “become a better writer” ceases to have effect.

In fact, I even dare to say that it not only becomes unnecessary, it can also become bad for your writing. And I say this as someone who has been writing for 6 years and is very much a perfectionist. (@Shannon: I’m her editor/writing cheer leader, and trust me, she definitely is.)

#1 Following this advice is unnecessary for more mature writers 

You have studied the craft. You have analyzed. You have researched. You know what structure is, how character arcs work, how to properly foreshadow and come full circle, how to slip themes seamlessly into your characters’ fears and desires, and how to do parallel character arcs like a pro.
You have practiced, a lot, (probably too much) on stories that will never see the light of day.
You know the art of sentence structure and when to show and when to tell so you can provoke the emotion in your reader. It has been years of gathering this knowledge, slowly but surely, and you have wisdom enough to know when the “rules” of writing can be bent or broken.

All stories follow similar patterns, have similar tropes, and have similar pitfalls. Once you know these things and what to look out for, the general advice of “read all the time in order to be a better writer” no longer applies to you.

There won’t be a new book that suddenly changes the rules to the craft. It will either be executed well or executed poorly, and you already know the reasons why a book is great or not. Very rarely will you read a fiction book that teaches you something that you did not know previously. .

At this point in a person’s writing journey, they should not feel ashamed when they are told by others that they aren’t reading enough. They can freely read for pleasure and enjoy a well-written book for its own sake, but no longer should they feel pressure to have a stack of books to assign time to every week.

If they feel the need to brush up on their knowledge by analyzing a few books, then good for them; but the advice no longer is a rule to follow, only an occasional tool to use.

They can now set aside their reading time for actual action—drafting, editing, getting feedback, and fixing their own work.

#2 Why reading constantly as a more mature writer can hurt you 

Everyone already knows that distractions are a thing. Really, this is one as well, this forum topic right here, and this website, as well as a host of other things that steal our productivity.

But in my opinion, this particular advice to “never stop reading” is harmful to a lot of writers because it presents itself as good advice for people at all stages of their writing journey.

Everyone tells us that at some point, we have to stop researching, and start writing. (This is a perfectionist flaw that I am very well aware of). However, no one seems to apply that to this “reading rule.”

That’s a problem.

@Shannon:  Consider this. I once took songwriting lessons from a famous songwriter. One very important thing she explained to me was this:  if I wanted to write songs, I could not be constantly listening to music. If you constantly fill your mind with someone else’s melodies and words, there is no longer any room for your own.

This, of course, applies to writing as well. We cannot constantly read if we want to have mental space to express our own thoughts. Because of this, we cannot analyze other writer’s works while we are in the process of creating our own. It is counter productive.

Either you are going to analyze books, or you are going to write them. These two things do not mix well.

(@LRC: I personally even try to avoid reading for fun when I know I am going to draft that day; I have noticed that too much intake of other people’s fiction can cloud the mind and mess up the output of your own creativity).

When reading is important for a writer 

There are two main types of research in the writing realm:

– Researching the craft of writing
– Researching for a specific WIP.

We have already talked about the first one, and how reading and analyzing a lot is a very important tool to use as a new writer.

This second one is more in regard to a person’s own writing process, which is different for every single person. So we don’t hold too tightly to this, but we wanted to put it out there:

Researching and reading books in preparation to write a new WIP is a good idea, but only before you start drafting.

Typically, a process will go something like this:

– The Birth of an Idea
– Exploratory stage: is this a feasible idea?
– Research
– Outlining (if you’re an outliner) and character arc development
– Drafting

During the research phase is when you read the books. It’s when you get a taste of the market and what you like, don’t like, and the pitfalls you need to look out for in your own, slowly forming story. For example, if you are writing a historical fiction book, read a book set in the same era your story is based in, read a biography of a person who lived in that same era, and read a history book about that time period.

The drafting phase is the time when you do NOT read the books, at least in order to analyze and learn.

You are past that stage, you know the stuff; get your nose out of the book and write your own thing.

Make sense?

No? Still disagree?

Okay, well thank you for your time. We will carefully dodge the rocks that you throw at us and disappear back into the mist from whence we came.