On Reading
How to Write, What to Write, and Why to Write
Categories:
[Find]
Tags:
[Ideas]
If you want to write, you are going to have to read. I know this goes against the "anyone can write/anything is better than a blank page" ethos of ELA, but hear me out. Writing is not the only hobby out there, and it might be that you are actually more suited to something else instead. And that's perfectly fine; not everyone has to write, even if they could.
First of all, writing is an extension of reading. People that are really passionate about reading might go on to also try writing an a natural progression of their love of reading. But if you are not already absolutely in admiration of the written word, you will struggle to work your way through the writing process. And it certainly is work to write, even as a hobby. If you don't have, at bare minimum, the patience to read what you wrote at least once, you are going to miss out on the editing and polishing steps of the process. Your story will sound like it was written by someone that is not a reader, and your readers will be able to tell.
Because secondly, writing takes its inspiration from reading. Reading is how you learn the feeling and the expectations of a genre, or the freshness and staleness of a trope, or the mixing of all the little things you like into your own unique voice and style. Before you write a story in a genre, you should first read a dozen good stories in that genre. You need to at least know how others are putting together the stories that they are telling, and what they are saying with those stories, and what you like about how they are doing both. And, most importantly, you need to know what makes your own story yours. Something with only one inspiration is going to sound very much like its sole inspiration, but something with as few as two inspirations can combine elements of each in a variety of ways. With enough different inspirations (especially across genres!), it quickly becomes easy to come up with a new idea that feels both familiar and fresh at the same time.
And third, and perhaps most boring, reading a lot will teach you the mechanics of writing. You could learn about verb tenses and point-of-view and sentence structure and punctuation and what section breaks and chapter breaks look like from an English class or a textbook (and you probably still will), or you can learn it by reading a fun and thrilling book instead. Every fiction book you read for fun actually is a great way to learn how writing works, and you don't even need to turn in a book report to prove you learned it. See it done enough times, and you will start to just know what a work of fiction is supposed to look like (while still needing to occasionally double-check a book from time to time...but only when you start editing!).
The thing that many writers say, again and again, is that they wanted to write the kind of story that they wanted to read, but couldn't find. So go out, read a lot, and then write the thing that you want to read. If you want to read it, chances are there's at least one other reader out there that wants to read something just like that too!