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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

Whilte the author's reflections are incredibly deep and worthwhile on their own, what struck me most about this article was just the tremendous quality of the writing. Is the recipe to being able to produce writing like this simply to become a voracious consumer of similarly-excellent writing?

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I mean the guy was the poet laureate of the United States once... =]

Lots of reading, lots of writing, and a healthy dose of inborn talent. Also, the New Yorker has excellent editors.

An editor gave an advice for the aspiring writer once: read more books.

—Will it help?

—Sure. The moore time you spend reading the less time you will have for writing crap.

That's not the reason though. Writing crap is actually what makes you write awesome stuff. Reading is a way to see what other people do and learn from their crap and awesome stuff, if you take the opportunity to really take things in beside the story it contains.

If I'm interpreting the first 5 paragraphs correctly, the author has been writing continuously since about 1950.

Before that even. I bought Essays After Eighty linked below and he began writing poetry when he was 15 which was around 1944. He was US Poet Laureate in 2006. An incredible body of work.

That's pretty much the idea espoused in _Steal Like An Artist_. Read and write a lot. Pick your heroes. Sponge up their stuff. Make more stuff.

Agreed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much packed so concisely and plainly, without sacrificing style.

"Consumer",in this context, is a really bad choice of word.

Wow, and I thought I was the only one. Something has always rubbed me the wrong way when people talk about "consuming" media. I get the sense they're trying to push some kind of agenda about the sociological evils of newspapers or pornography or whatever.

Perhaps the reason it's an off-putting word in this context is that it usually has the connotation of using up its object. Generally when you consume something it's no longer there for someone else, an attribute that's not usually the case with a written work.

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