This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 15: Why Is It So Important For Writers To Read?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and I am really excited for this week’s episode. Well, I’m usually excited for the episode for the week, but this week more excitement than usual. It’s not just because I am highly caffeinated right now. It is because I get to do two things. The first of which is talk about books. The second of which is answer a question that I get asked a lot. And that question is, why as a writer is it so important for me to read? Why do people keep telling me that writers need to read so much? And what are the benefits of reading for writers?

So I’d like to start off today’s episode by explaining a little bit, at least, why I love to read so very much and why it’s so important to me. I was raised by parents who were very much of the television will rot your brain persuasion. And so growing up, we could watch a couple shows on PBS, such as Sesame Street or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or if I was home sick from school, Reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton. Sometimes when my grandmother would visit from Texas, we could watch Wheel of Fortune with her. And once in a very great while, we would be indulged in an evening viewing of Star Trek or Masterpiece theater on PBS.

However, while our television watching was pretty severely restricted, we were permitted to read absolutely whatever we wished. We lived within walking distance of the library and the feeling that I got when I walked in those doors and realized that every single book that I could see was potentially one that I could take home and absorb, it was amazing. The possibility, it’s such a wonderful feeling as a child to know that the entire world is laid open to you and that you have the power to choose what you take away from it.

So I would go to the library and pick up books, anything that looked interesting to me from picture books when I was little to chapter books, to young adult books, and then to the fiction and science fiction and mystery and horror shelves as an adult. I did have a predilection for fiction. Oh my gosh, that rhymes. I’m pretty upfront about that. Since I didn’t have television to carry my imagination away, I turned to books for that purpose.

I read a lot of educational stuff in school, and we had a full set of encyclopedias at home, but there was nothing like being able to escape into a fictional world in a book of my choosing. I read everything I could get my hands on. Some of which I probably read a little bit before I was ready to read them. I remember hitting the romance novel shelves as a middle schooler and being like, whoa, but those books became home to me in a way that home never really was.

My transition from reading into writing came quite naturally, I think, as it does with a lot of voracious readers. You pick up on the fact that reading is a kind of magic that books are these little ecosystems all in their own. And you feel drawn to see if you have that magic inside of you too. If you have worlds inside of you that you can create, or, and I think it was Toni Morrison who said this, at some point, there’s nothing else that you want to read, and so you go ahead and create that book that you want to read.

Now, I think a lot of us, many of us, given the choice, would simply hang out at home or in a cozy place and do nothing but read and/or write all day long. But this is reality, and this is a podcast about work-life writing balance. I think a lot of writers question the need to read because they’re so busy. They’re just so busy. They say, “Sarah, I only have one hour to myself a day. And if I’m going to be a writer, even a scantily part-time writer, then that hour needs to go toward writing and not reading.” And I understand that.

But as Stephen King notes in his excellent book On Writing, which I’ve referred to many times before, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” He also says that, “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. Simple as that.”

So that sounds pretty harsh. But throughout this episode, I’m going to lay out the benefits of reading for any writer in any genre. I think that you’ll see he’s simply being truthful. When he says that reading is the creative center of a writer’s life, I think of listening to music being the creative center of a musician’s life. Can you imagine a musician who doesn’t have time to listen to music? Can you imagine a chef who doesn’t have time to sit down and eat? So what I did was I sat down and I started brainstorming about the benefits of reading for a writer. And I came up with a list of 17 things, but I did some editing and trimmed it down a little bit so that it would make more sense for a podcast episode. And so I chose my top eight.

So today I’m going to share with you not necessarily eight reasons to read as a writer, but eight benefits to writers from reading. All right. So the first benefit, and for me, this is where it all begins, reading lets you understand what a reader wants and needs, and in turn what you, as a writer, will need to give to your readers. I’ve read a lot over the years, not to boast, but I’m a big reader. And one of the coolest things I’ve gotten out of that is an understanding of what I like and what I don’t like, and what I want from a story and what I don’t want from a story as a reader.

Once you understand what readers want, you can deliver it to them. I think it goes without saying that that can be very good for book sales. Not that I’m suggesting you sacrifice all artistic integrity to give the masses what they want. That’s certainly not what I’m saying, but I’m saying as a reader and as the type of reader who would likely consume the materials that you’re writing, you can get an idea of what that audience, no matter how niche would want out of what you write.

Number two, reading gives strong fundamentals in both story structure and plot development. So in my school district, when I was in maybe eighth grade or ninth grade, or what have you, we learned about basic story structure. I’m sure that if you went through a similar curriculum, you remember the drawing that accompanied this. So it was a line that then went up, went back down again, and then continued on and it made a peak. The different elements to this very simple diagram explained how a story works. So you begin with exposition, you continue into the rising action, which is when the line begins to go up diagonally, you hit the climax at the top, you descend into the falling action, and then comes the resolution, or as we learned it and felt very fancy saying it, the denouement.

Now for me, and perhaps for you seeing this diagram only sort of visually represented what we already knew very deeply. To make a story interesting, you need to have an introduction to either explain your world or reveal your worlds to your reader. You need stuff that happens, so the rising action. You need a moment of craziness or the climax. Then you need to resolve your plot. It’s very simple. Now, along with a basic understanding of story structure comes the freedom to deviate from it. I kind of believe that you can’t really break rules until you understand the rules that you’re breaking in the first place. So I’m not telling you to understand story structure so that you can perfectly emulate story structure in its five steps. It’s not what I’m saying.

What I am saying is that the more you read, the more that you see how people follow and deviate from this plot structure, from this story structure, and you can see examples where it’s done well and examples where it’s done poorly. I think it’s also very important to read works where the plot comes sort of secondary to something else. So two examples. I love William Gibson. He is without a doubt in my top five writers ever. But if you read Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition, I think you’ll notice that what’s grabbing you about his books is not necessarily the plot. So I don’t read his books to see what happens. I read his books because he is an interesting writer who knows how to use language in a way that I would have never thought to use in myself. He is brilliant and an artist, but I don’t read his work for the, this, then this, then this.

Another example is Janet Evanovich, who is probably best known for the Stephanie Plum mystery series. If you’ve read a Stephanie Plum mystery, you’re not reading it because there’s plot twists that will blow your mind or because it’s a mystery like you’ve never read before. Ms. Evanovich’s mystery novels are pretty rote. Something happens, and then the mystery is solved. It’s not a brain twister. So you might ask, why read these? I read this series for the characters. Janet Evanovich is very, very skilled at creating characters that you just instantly bond with and that you love.

Stephanie Plum is extremely relatable. Her insane grandmother who goes on a lot of adventures with her is simply delightful, and of course, she has some very interesting romantic suitors that are also really fun to read. So two cases in which the story structure and the plot development are not the main focus of the work, but again, it is important to understand the basics and the fundamentals before you stray from them.

Number three, reading can give you a feel for and enhance your own sense of style in writing. A writer’s style is unique and ephemeral and extremely difficult to describe or pin down, which is why you must see it in action, I believe, rather than reading descriptions of it. So I can say that Hemingway style is very terse and masculine and subtly tense, but I don’t think you fully understand what makes Hemingway style Hemingway style until you actually read Hemingway. In his book On Writing, Stephen King says, “Good writing teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters and truth-telling.” All of those intangible unteachables, I believe you can pick those up from good writing and that you can only pick those up by reading.

Along with style comes voice, which I talked about in podcast episode number 11, which I can link to in the show notes. In that episode, I talk about the essentialness, is that a word? The essential nature, maybe of reading when developing your own voice as a writer. Finally, along with all of these stylistic elements, when we talk about style, we’re talking about those unteachable intangibles, those elements of style, the ways in which you use words in a way that is wholly your own. Some of these elements could include smooth transitions, word flow, diction, or word choice, but also things like assonance and use of metaphor and even an ear for the use of how repetition can work for your advantage. These are all crucial. I even think that you can learn grammar from reading.

True story, I did not learn grammar in school. I was always in sort of the accelerated track of learning, and so they would ship me away on a little bus several days a week while the rest of my classmates were learning about the fundamentals of grammar, I would be doing weird experiments on plants and reading books and programming stuff. And so I kind of missed out on a lot of those fundamentals, but luckily I read enough that I developed sort of an ear for grammar. And so what happened was I got to college and I did terrible at foreign languages because you had to understand the parts of speech, and I didn’t know what a preposition was and words like pluperfect sounded alien to me.

But I did do very well in my writing courses because while I couldn’t name why something was wrong in grammatical terms, I knew that it was wrong. I knew that something didn’t necessarily sound right. So to use a musical analogy, I could tell when a chord was dissonant, but I couldn’t explain why it was dissonant. I took a course in modern English grammar my senior year of college, and I diagrammed a sentence for the first time and it was weird and confusing.

So today I do a lot of editing in my job and I say, “Hey, this is wrong. You need a semi-colon here,” or, “Hey, you need a comma here.” And people will ask me why. And at that point I have two choices. Number one, I can think back really hard to my grammar class that I took in college and do some Googling around words like antecedent and conjunction and try to remember exactly why it’s wrong, or I can just say it’s wrong and fix it. So a little grammatical confession there. I learned grammar from reading and I still can’t tell you what pluperfect means.

Number four, reading gives you inspiration and drive. I think to some degree or another as human beings, we are at least somewhat naturally competitive. When I read something, I tend to think, could I have written this? Or could I have written this better, because this is not super great? Reading good materials gives me a bar to aim for. Reading more and more good stuff keeps moving that bar higher and higher. It gives me something to aspire toward.

But you know what? I think that even reading bad crappy writing can give you inspiration and drive. What I mean by that is when you read something that’s just really awful, something that’s been published, that can be kind of inspiring and you can be like, wow, if this person got this published, there is nothing stopping me from publishing my book, which is way better. So it can help you really realize your talent or realize that you have some improvements to make, both of which I think are healthy.

Number five, read to get ideas. Ideas are different from inspiration. Inspiration is a feeling, a drive, a passion. Ideas are the things that you can write about, philosophical quandaries or moral problems or just a great idea for a character. You can get ideas from pretty much anything that you read, from novels, to nonfiction books, to biographies, to articles in the New York Times or whatever you prefer to read, to tweets on Twitter. You never know when something that you read is going to spark an idea for a new story or raise a question that had always bothered you, but you never knew how to put into words.

I get my best ideas for writing when I am reading. I’m not saying I’m copying other people’s ideas, but rather engaging with or responding to them. I have another confession for you. I am a person who writes in the margins of her books. So if I see something interesting, I will use a pencil and I will underline it, and then I will write my own thoughts in the margin beside it. So what I end up doing is almost having a dialogue with whatever book I’m reading, with whatever author wrote that book, and those ideas can stew and evolve and grow and flourish and become very interesting premises for whatever I write next.

Number six, read to find out what has already been done. So I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes I will think of a really cool invention. I’ll be like, oh man, I just invented something. And then I’ll tell someone about it and they’ll be like, “Yeah, Sarah, that already exists and it’s called this and you can buy it here and here. And yeah, you didn’t invent that.”

The same thing has happened to me before with writing. So I will be, I don’t know, a good five or six chapters into a new book that I’m writing. And inevitably, I don’t know why or how this happens, someone will recommend a book to me, or I will stumble upon a book in Goodreads that is just disgustingly similar to what I thought was an original idea. Now, granted, you can still take those ideas and spin them or turn them in new ways, yada, yada, but it’s just a really good idea to read, to keep on top of things, especially within your genre that other people are doing so that you know that you are blazing a new path and not simply retreading a tired idea that’s been done to death.

Number seven, when you read, it gives you an edge and allows you to take advantage of lessons that have already been learned by your predecessors. Literature has an extremely rich history. People have been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years, and over time, the way that we tell those stories and the things that we expect from them as readers or listeners has also changed and evolved. So an argument against writers reading voraciously that I have heard used before is that a certain writer doesn’t want to be influenced or tainted by other writers’ writing. And to a certain extent, I understand that.

I know when I’m reading a book, I tend to take on a little bit of that author’s tone or style when I’m writing. It’s just how it works. But at the same time, not wanting to be tainted by anything that you would pick up while you’re reading can really expose you to a lot of difficulties. So think of it this way. Someone wants to paint a picture and they have purposefully never looked at a painting so they are not tainted or influenced. They want the absolute purest form of self expression in paint that they can come up with.

So they dip their hand in a bucket of paint and smear it on a wall. Now their hand is dirty and the wall is dirty, and well let’s go ahead and paint on something else. Oh, I canvas. All right, we’ll paint on a canvas. And instead of our hand, we’ll use this brush. All right. So now we’re getting paint on the canvas with a brush and okay, we’re doing this. Oh, and look, we made a square. Well, great. You made a square. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Going into something completely pure and untainted is also going into something naive and unprepared. You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble and headache by arming yourself appropriately for the task at hand. Take advantage of all the years and years of literature arrayed in front of you. There’s so much to read and there are so many lessons that other writers have already learned. It’s your job to build on top of that and not necessarily to start from scratch.

Finally, number eight, and I’m going to take this one directly from Stephen King’s On Writing. He says, “The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place, a mind-set if you like the phrase, where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, of what is trite and what is fresh, and what works and what just lies there dying, or dead, on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or your Word processor.”

So those were what I saw as my eight favorite benefits of reading for writers. There are more, but those were my eight favorite ones. So now that we’ve established the importance of reading, I’d like to go back to our question of, I don’t have time to read. I need to use that time to write if I’m going to get anything done. So let’s talk about the times and places that you can fit reading into your schedule. Number one, your favorite place to read, whether that’s out in your garden, in your favorite arm chair by the fireplace, or if you’re like me, I go to bed a little bit early every night so that I can read and fall asleep reading. And that just ensures that I have time to read every day.

Number two, over your lunch break. So whether you take your lunch break at your desk at work or in a break room with other people, I found that it’s fairly easy. If not, maybe super socially acceptable to just sort of isolate yourself and bust out a book and do your thing. If people tend to come up to you and talk to you and interrupt you while you’re reading, I found that a pair of headphones just connected to your phone or an MP3 player will sort of chase people away and kind of deter them from interrupting you. The beauty of that is you don’t even really have to be listening to anything. I’ve just put in headphones before, because I like to read in silence. And so I’ve got my headphones in and I just pretend that I’m listening to something while I’m reading and nobody bothers me. And it is glorious.

Number three, while you’re waiting. So I’m one of those people who brings a book wherever I go, and I purposely carry around a large purse so that I can fit one or two books wherever I end up. And so whether you are waiting in the doctor’s office for an appointment, or you’re standing in a really long checkout line, or you’re at the DMV or on the toilet, always have a book with you. If you read in just three short 10 minute increments a day, you’re reading a half hour a day, and that will go far in making you a better writer.

Number four, during your commute. Now, this one really only works for people who maybe live in a larger city and ride a bus or a train, or sit in a carpool situation. So if you’re driving, please don’t read while you’re driving. But if you’re commuting from a suburb into Chicago and you know that twice a day you have 40 minutes where you are sitting and being bored, or perhaps listening to podcasts like this one, that can be a great opportunity to open up a book.

Number five, while you’re working out. So I don’t go to a gym regularly because I hate exercise, but I’ve noticed that a lot of the treadmill machines have like little grooves on them where you can rest a book or an eReader. And so really I think for any machine that has like a television option and some of them even have built in televisions now, so a cycling machine or a treadmill or an elliptical, any of that, it’s very easy to prop up a book and pass the time by reading while you’re exercising.

Finally, number six, for all other situations not mentioned above, I hope you know about the beauty of audiobooks. So these you can do if you are driving. You can listen to audiobooks while you are jogging or gardening or going on your walk, really anywhere that you can listen to music or to a podcast, you can listen to an audiobook. Don’t let the prospect of price turn you off. Many, if not most libraries, have a really great selection of audiobooks. You don’t even have to check out those giant packages of like 12 CDs anymore. You can download MP3s. It’s awesome. And I do it all the time, especially on long car trips. I can usually get through a couple books during a drive.

So there you have eight benefits of reading for writers and as a bonus, six ways to fit reading into your lifestyle. This week’s book of the week is surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, a Stephen King book. It is not On Writing, because I’ve already covered that one. I don’t want you to think I’m like this huge, like Stephen King fan girl. The first book I ever read by Stephen King was his book On Writing because before I had dismissed him as, oh, he’s just a hack that writes silly, scary stories and who cares.

But I’ve really grown to like his books. It’s kind of a treat as an adult to never have read them before and to kind of come into them fresh and new. And so this week I read one I’d never even heard of before called Bag of Bones. And this one, especially I think is a really lovely treat for writers because it is about a writer, writer Michael Noonan, who is perhaps a loose version of Stephen King. He is a bestselling suspense author who loses his wife and is swept up in a series of obsessions and hauntings that take place on the shores of Dark Score Lake.

Michael Noonan has a cabin there on the edge of the lake and soon discovers that there are several presences there, potentially his departed wife, but potentially some other entities as well. However, the focus of this story is on a custody battle for a little girl who is being taken away from her mother by a cruel man whose wealth speaks louder than the mother’s words and abilities to care for her child.

I think that struck me as the weirdest element of this book. There’s this like weird almost mashup of genres present in this book. You kind of go from reading about a very John Grisham like child custody case to, oh my gosh, this creepy thing is happening when he’s alone in his cabin that’s probably haunted. And it’s just, these two genres are just seamlessly woven together. It’s a little bit baffling. I think Stephen King is really talented at drawing together different lines of story that you would never expect.

So I would read it just to get an idea for how he does that, and also because it’s a really compelling and engaging and fun to read book about a writer, just like you. Well, maybe not just like you, unless you are a multimillionaire, very successful novel writer, but he struggles with the same thing all writers struggle with, writer’s block, self-doubt, a loss of faith in himself and his muse. It is certainly worth a read.

Special thanks this week go out to Patreon supporter and official rad dude Sean Locke, as well as my other wonderful, steadfast, and lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you guys so much. Your generosity helps me continue to do this. So thank you. This week I’d also like to thank my husband, Tim, who once again, has been reduced to sneaking around the house in slippers and tiptoeing and wearing headphones and just generally being as silent as he can be while I record. So Tim, you are just wonderful. Thank you so much.

I would also like to thank my very dear friend, Melissa Johnson. I met Melissa through a women’s leadership program and she has just naturally fallen into this role for me of dear friend, but also writing mentor. She is a writer and just deeply compassionate and brilliant. We had coffee this morning and I’m going to credit her with the energy and drive that I had after a long workday to come home and record a podcast. So thank you, Melissa so much for being such an inspiration.

Thanks to all of you who are following the Write Now podcast on, gosh, it’s hard to keep track of all the social media stuff, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, SoundCloud. I don’t know if there’s a social media venue, you can probably find my podcast on it. So thank you for engaging with me in that way. You can also sign up to receive emails from me for free on my website, sarahwerner dot com, S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Either scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll get a little popup box in which you can type your email address, or navigate to the contact page on my website, where you’ll see a link that will take you to a sign up for my email list. I won’t spam you. I think I’ve sent a total of like three emails total ever. So hopefully they’re fun and interesting, and just another way to connect between podcast episodes.

Finally, I would like to thank you for listening. Podcasting has become just a really important part of my life and I’ve found that I love doing it and I wouldn’t be able to do it if there was nobody to listen to me. So, oh my gosh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to listen to me ramble on and on about writing.

Until next time, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner, and I think you’re pretty amazing.