You Should Do More Than Read

Perhaps the most common advice given to writers just starting out on their journey is, “Read more. Read a lot. Read a variety of things and genres.” Look around on the internet and social media and it won’t take you long to find some iteration of this. I’ve always found this advice to be lacking, though. It’s incomplete at best.

The problem is that it assumes some sort of learning through diffusion, wherein if you only see enough “good writing” you, too, will be able to produce good writing. But I don’t think art works that way. I think there’s another component to writing, to any art, really: studying.

Imagine that someone wants to learn to play the piano. Now imagine telling that person, “Just listen to a bunch of piano music.” Granted, some people can learn music by ear. They can hear a song and just reproduce it. But people with perfect pitch are a rare exception. By and large, most people take lessons to play the piano, where they learn about scales and chords and (presumably) some music theory.

Likewise, a painter might study color and lighting. A sculptor might study form. But the common denominator is that there’s active learning going on, whereby people give themselves tools and language to understand their art.

For whatever reason, this logic never extends to writing. People are expected to utilize some completely passive learning system where they’ll somehow understand good writing just by looking at it. I don’t know how that would ever work. Someone may be able to identify that they like a particular piece of writing, but they probably won’t be able to articulate why it’s good. And if they can’t do that, how are they supposed to integrate the concepts and ideas they encounter into their own writing?

The short answer is that they won’t be able to. Someone whose only form of study is reading will spend years just blindly groping at things they encounter in books and trying in vain to cobble them into their own writing. After many years of trial and error a person might succeed at this. But they could also study craft.

I’m not saying you have to sign up for fancy courses or find yourself a tutor or a mentor or whatever. You could just pick up some books on the craft of writing from your library. Anything so that you understand not just the nuts and bolts of language, but what makes characters realistic and compelling, the parts of a story, plot, action, dialog, etc. Reading is important if you want to be a good writer. But I firmly believe that it’s much easier to take salient things away from what you read if you have some understanding of craft first.

So, if you’re going to the library or bookstore to pick up some reading to get you started, make sure you also pick up and book or two about craft. You’ll thank yourself later.