With a Possible Exception…Maybe
This week’s post stems from a recent Twitter conversation. Someone posted a comment from an aspiring writer who said that they don’t like reading. The tweeter asked the writing community for its thoughts about this. After all, most of us who write are also avid readers, and many well-published authors (she quoted Stephen King) have said that non-readers don’t have the tools to be writers. The question was, “can you be a good writer without being a good reader?” My answer was a mixed one, but all in all I tend to hold the established stance and can explain why writers should also be readers.
There are reasons why this is true, and [maybe] a caveat or two to allow for a rare exception. I’ll give three high-level reasons why reading gives writers the tools they need to be good at their craft.
Character Development
I can see why a non-reader might say that there’s no reason why they have to learn character development from reading. After all, we’re surrounded by people, aren’t we? Even when we’d rather not be. And writers tend to be consummate observers.
A close friend once told me that she sees me as an observer of life rather than a participant. At the time I thought this might be an indicator that I was abnormal in some unacceptable way. Later I learned that many writers are described this way. We love to watch people – how they react to different situations, how they relate to one another. We linger on the fringes, watching, asking questions, waiting to see the responses.
But there’s something that non-readers haven’t understood. Characters in fiction need to have something of a positive or negative character development that isn’t like real life.
In real life, people sometimes repeat the same mistakes until the day they die. Sometimes they learn a lesson in one setting only to fail at it in another. They might grow in some ways, regress in others and then reverse their path. In summary: people in real life often don’t seem to grow or regress in ways that make sense.
In contrast, a novel has to close most of the loops it has opened. Our characters aren’t perfect saints when we type The End, but they need to have a discernible character arc (positive or negative) that resonates with readers. As writers, we learn much of that by reading. We absorb the stories around us and pick up an intuition as to how characters should struggle and change.
Even rule benders start from an understanding of what works. And the only way to know what works is by reading.
New Worlds
Another of the more acknowledged benefits of reading is that it exposes us to new worlds – not just fantasy ones, but also places and times that we’ve never experienced. Even within my own country, America, there are so many areas I’ve never lived. So many types of families that are unlike my own. So many experiences I’ve never had.
I’ve never been a logger in western Montana, or a short order cook in a diner off of Route 66, or a physics professor exploring far galaxies in an observatory deep in the desert. But writers write about these things. And by reading them, my perspective of humanity and the world opens up.
I can hear the non-reader arguing that he has no intention of writing about these things. He plans to write what he knows. And that might work.
But it probably won’t work as well as it would for him if he were a reader. As writers, we need to craft worlds and stories that are unique. Even if we’re writing about our own small town or urban metropolis, reading gives us a wider view that allows us to color in the corners of our little world so that it comes to life in a richer, more multi-faceted way.
Pacing, Sentence Structure, Diction
And lastly, there are all of the little things that add up to make a huge difference in writing. These are the writing elements that are the hardest to teach someone. Think about the writing craft books out there. Most of them deal with characters, plotting and story structure, or fostering increased creativity and time in a writer’s life.
Pacing is both a high-level thing – how the plot unfolds – which is often taught as part of story structure, and a granular thing – how sentence structure impacts the readers’ experience. This is something I rarely see discussed: that the ebb and flow of sentence length (short, long, short, short, long) greatly impacts the reader’s experience.
Yes, we all know that longer sentences slow down the action; shorter ones speed it up. But how can we teach an aspiring writer how to apply this? I don’t know. It’s not that simple. There’s an intuition that good writers have as to how the writing should rise and fall.
That also extends to the writer’s use of diction. Newbie writers often over-do it, thinking that great writing is the difference between simplistic and complex vocabulary. Oh, how wrong that is. Read Cormac McCarthy or Ray Bradbury, two extraordinarily meaty and profound writers. Both use almost exclusively everyday language.
But word choice matters. What will make the greatest impact? What do word choices tell us about a character? How do they affect a reader’s emotions? Can we use two sets of words to describe a horrible accident and leave readers, in one case unaffected and, in the other, in despair?
Yes, of course we can. And it’s not simply a matter of describing the character’s feelings. Writing goes far beyond that. I love how Donald Maass handles this in The Emotional Craft of Fiction. In his book, he opens writers’ minds to the fact that just showing the character’s feelings doesn’t necessarily affect readers at all. It’s all those other things.
The use of specific words, pacing, subtle indicators that the opposite is true, etc. These are things that can be taught to a small extent, but which are largely gained through exposure. Through reading. Writers have to read in order to study how these feats are accomplished in different settings and circumstances. They have to gain a feel for it so that it’s a natural extension of their ability.
A Possible Exception
However, I want to leave room for the rare exception. One tweeter pointed out that screenwriters might not read much at all and yet have experienced a myriad of storytelling examples. Very true. The same might be true for playwrights. When we say that writers need to be readers, that means that they need to study storytelling in some form, which is what he’s getting at.
I also noted that there may be some writers who struggle to find material that they enjoy reading. However, that still leaves them without the experiential gains that we talked about here. That person should study what’s done well but doesn’t love, so that he can produce the things that he does love.
As an example of what not to do, in response to my tweet (in which I said I’d be interested to see what a non-reader produces), a non-reader sent me a link to a short piece he had written. I read it. Twice. I still have no idea what it is. It has no structure, no character growth. It isn’t a short story, or a piece of flash fiction, or poetry. It has no semblance of meaning at all.
And that is the point. Writers need to read in order to understand how to convey thoughts to readers in a way that makes sense and tells a story. We get much of that from reading.
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