To become a better writer, read as much as you can
nappertime.com
nappertime.com
This is the key point, I think. I've seen the same as the author: people who want to be writers but rarely read books. And I don't get it.
I recently finished a novel (now shopping around for agents, which was hard enough pre-AI but now...) and reading was integral to writing it. I know good sentences. I know the style of prose I like to read. I know how things can veer between florid and poetic and where the line is. I know how a sentence can be completely different if you read it as though it was spoken, instead of to yourself (some of mine are written to be read.)
I know the things that annoy me: dropping out to put thoughts in italics; descriptions that specify instead of evoke; characters talking without it leading somewhere. (And much more.)
How do I know this? From reading.
And I want to tell the story. It was a story that grew, that I think will anger the right people (it's not too kind to Musk or VCs or the Russian Orthodox Church), and yet is simply an adventure, tumbling our characters from situation to situation like they fell overboard while navigating rapids. Ultimately I wrote a book I wanted to read. It turned out to be about post-apocalyptic startups and sea monsters.
Someday I'll publish, I hope. And no doubt someone will read it and find style they dislike, learn from it things they don't want to do in their writing, either. But I also hope that there are moments in the book that will inspire someone else, in that they too will want to write, based on what they read.
I don't, but before focusing on a novel I spent the past couple of decades periodically writing short stories. There is a skill to writing, and it needs the ten thousand hours just like everything else.
But I cannot imagine doing it without reading first, and alongside.
I'm tired of hearing about the usual greats and also booker prize ones because they have good characters and good story content or shocking emotionally but are quite bland on the language front because they assume their readers have grade 5 level capacity so the sentences are simple, the vocab is basic. Thank you vintage dave
For the ultimate in non-basic vocab, try Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
The English translation of Metro 2033 is amazing. You can feel the stylistic differences originating in the Russian language, and it's a very evocative horror story with slightly longer sentences and richer language than ordinary books.
Both the Babel books and Metro 2033 (especially) were inspirations for me, writing my novel. And Wolfe is one of my literary heroes, one of the most amazing writers I have ever read. Every one of his novels is rewarding, often through not just language but complexity of plot and narrator. He uses unreliable narrators a lot; beautifully, in one of his series the narrator has amnesia and cannot remember what occurred the previous day, so writes notes to himself. (Soldier of the Mist. Also rewarding once you figure out the name and location references.)
An older classic: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan is extraordinary in language, but also in the rhythm of sentences. Definitely one written to be read with a voice, not just internally.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville has dense prose. Wonderful book, very rewarding to read.
But simpler prose but it can be just as rewarding when it is written for a purpose, and I'd love to recommend to you Lavie Tidhar's Osama. It is written in noir style, and so the sentences are far simpler, sparser. Yet there are multiple styles in this book and the kind of prose tells you a lot about story or the place in the world. I am writing vaguely because I don't want to give spoilers. He is an excellent writer and he chose a specific style in this book that he executed very well.
No need to always flex with some highbrow stuff to find a masterful style.
He writes sentences around how they're, eh, delivered? Can't think of a better word. Lots of footnotes and clauses and parentheticals. And the timing of his words make the jokes.
I would absolutely call him a landmark writer, but I wouldn't call him lit fic in the publishing sense.
I'll be honest: my (for now quite small) experience with the /lit/ canon has been very hit-or-miss for now. It feels like Literature with a capital L is something only ivory tower academics and New-Yorker or Parisian critics have the right to stick to works and they decided that comedy cannot be part of it. They're also very quick to ignore small and larger crossings into purple prose territory when it pleases them.
Similar in a sense to the music world, where the crowd that decides what is Serious Work^tm is enshrining contemporary classical, post-modernism and performance art instead of sifting through the (admittedly lackluster) popular music world that has produced genuine pearls often rivaling, sometimes eclipsing their dominion.
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End of rant, sincerly sorry.
tl;dr: yes, Pratchett isn't literature in any sense of the word (nobody claimed so, anyway) but your scale may be a bit too logarithmic, putting him and much worse stuff in the same basket.
> He writes sentences around how they're, eh, delivered? Can't think of a better word. And the timing of his words make the jokes.
You put the words in my mouth, very accurate way of describing his style!
E.L. Doctorow is another such example. Try The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, Loon Lake.
In the scifi genre (aside from the Shikasta series already mentioned), M. John Harrison is worth a look. He’s got a long bibliography but Light might be a good starting point.
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum.
Some of Ursula Le Guin’s more serious books might fit the bill, like The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness.
Someone already mentioned Mervyn Peake, he definitely fits this category.
Moby Dick is unexpectedly stylish. You'd think a story about a whale would be more genre-ish, but the writing is very fun.
Then there are heavy hitters are writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, and Virginia Woolf.
James Joyce is the end level boss. Ulysses is readable, but by the time you get to Finnegan's Wake it's hard to imagine anyone getting more abstract.
I cannot fathom how people enjoy that book. I appreciate the writing (and love other CM books) but Blood Meridian felt like a gratuitous ordeal to me. I tried watching lit professors lecture about it too but I still just don’t get it.
Nabokov? His protagonists have very special styles of speaking. I'd recommend "Pale Fire" (which is also very funny and has an interesting hypertext-like structure) as a starter.
Another author that comes to mind is Zizek. His books could easily be reduced to a boring 2 page essay, but instead they are taken on a wild ride through cultural and theory and philosophical history and virtually encoded in philosophy jargon in order to absolutely reek of intellectualism. I'm 0% ashamed to admit openly that keeping up with him as I read makes me proud of my brain and attention capacity way more than I actually agree with his specific political philosophy in a work.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Thankfully, the story is as strong as the prose. Excellent book all around.
Umberto Eco and Ursula Le Guin I agree on.
I will give you approximately twenty delightful novels where the prose and the stories are both excellent: Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series.
I avoided these books for the longest time because I didn't believe I was the kind of person who would read “books about tall ships.” But so many people recommend these particular books because of the masterly writing that I tried the first, Master and Commander. Immediately, I was taken by O’Brian’s writing: vivid, lively, and engaging, while also utterly precise.
Give that first novel a try. It’s not easy, but it is oh so rewarding.
Edited to add some examples from the first novel:
“I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage.”
“Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say ‘Yes, sir,’ his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true.”
“He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number.”
“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
Money, audience, attention, building a community around your ideas, pushing agenda, there are thousands of reasons why someone can like to do X without doing Y. And the one that trumps them all: they just feel like it.
Because the idea of being a writer is more appealing that the action of writing
> I know good sentences. I know the style of prose I like to read. I know how things can veer between florid and poetic and where the line is. I know how a sentence can be completely different if you read it as though it was spoken, instead of to yourself (some of mine are written to be read.)
Your perspective doesn’t really speak to me at all — because I’m writing as the way to explore and articulate ideas, while I’d get rid of the words as an unnecessary mess if I could. (And do when I can: diagrams, math, etc.)
Is it hard to understand that for some people it may be difficult to read ? It might be due to motivation issues, thrust issues, or concentration issues. While at the same time they may have a rich inner imagination or thinking that they would like to share.
My impression is that humanity might miss valuable insight by rejecting whatever is not "well written" whatever the reason might be.
You may feel yourself very luck if you don't have any difficulties to read and write. Avoid to judge severely people who don't share the same facilities.
There's other mediums to express ideas that isn't books if you are functionally illiterate.
The case for reading (and why its demise may lead us to dark places) was laid out very recently: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
Context is important. The blog discusses people taking training to be writers. Which I take means they aim to do it at least some way as career. And that puts lot higher bar for what they should be producing.
That is like someone aiming to be artist in visual arts never would even look at any other visual arts. Or understand the history and such. Probably not that useful education if you aim to be hireable or sell.
I literally cannot imagine being a musician who doesn't listen to music.
The best game devs all do though.
I could imagine a (solo) game dev not self-describe as a gamer, but they must have some intuition about what makes (video/board) games fun and engaging.
I can't imagine you can obtain that without ever playing games yourself?
"First was the vision, then the technique of working it out. I wanted to find my own way of singing by knowing myself. I knew that if I started listening to other singers, it would take me years to develop. So I shut myself off from other singers for along time."
from page 25 of https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/R%26B-Re...
The difference here, as you point out, is that Bobby already had a lifetime of listening to music and appreciating other singers.
You can turn this around as well: people don’t want to read, they want to be well read.
The difference is “effort and process” versus a status. People want the label, but don’t want to do the work to get there.
> The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.
Everyone likes stories in some form. Everything has a story and it's natural for the brain to invent new stories. Some stories are addictive - brain worms - you just need to explore the story you developed. Writing is the cheapest medium to explore it.
I'm certain if I wrote a book no one would want to read it - but maybe it's still a good story.
There's a sobering article recently published in The Atlantic[1][2] about the end of reading and how we're in a postliterate age. We're reading more words than ever, but instead of coming from books, they're coming from digital media. We're losing that same muscle for long-form reading and deep focus that the original author talks about being so critical for writing. I think it's the same muscle that lets us think. Quoting from The Atlantic:
> What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities.
Accelerated now by generative AI, I fear that the end of reading goes hand-in-hand with the end of writing. I've totally sworn of AI for reading and writing. Maybe that makes me a Luddite, but I don't want to lose those muscles and I don't want the world to become a place where humans no longer read or write or think.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
Yes, true, but that's also very much a thing you can do something about by, well: reading books.
It's a technique we must preserve for the good of our culture, but, also, in a society full of people who have forgotten how to, an individual superpower.
Are you talking about incentives?
And furthermore, a democracy can not survive if the majority of the voter base is incapable of critical thinking. It needs to be better than even a simple majority. It worked in the Colonies because the citizens were mostly middle class independent farmers, for whom critical thinking was essential. And even after the second industrial revolution, small business continued to be the cornerstone of the economy. The political landscape will mirror the economic one, and our economy is now ruled by petty tyrants.
First of all the Patriots were not even a simple majority. Turns out you don't need a majority to win what is basically a war of insurgency. There are several modern analogs that reflect this reality.
Second of all the country was founded by elites. It wasn't that farmers could do critical thinking (whatever that really means) it was that the punitive British response aligned economic incentives across class, and across North and South. So a large enough slice of the populace was ready to be sufficiently bought in on the propaganda of a few outstanding men.
Thirdly, your conception of history is wrong. Small elites always rule societies. America was not a democracy at its founding, that is if you take democracy to be the 21st century standard of universal suffrage. Societies are less about some arbitrary standard of critical thinking and more a contingent set of circumstances and incentives.
It's a bit ironic in your rather tired critique of modern culture you reveal another truth - those who complain about the contemporary intelligence of the masses often leave much to be desired in their own supposed superiority.
You should read more.
The "book bubble" of avid readers is the most anti-AI community I am a member of which is a very interesting perspective (I do research in AI as my main job). I don't touch AI for writing/editing etc. because I see it as a creative endeavor and enjoy spending time with a blank piece of paper or an empty latex file :D
We have cars; but people still walk, ride bicycles and even horses. We have rhythm machines and synthesisers, and people still play drums and other instruments.
So we will keep writing and reading. A lot of specific details about how we are doing either will change, but the activities will still be there.
Garbage in, garbage out.
What he meant by that was that it's not enough to simply read. You have to read high quality literature if you want to become a writer. You can't expect to read nothing but news, comic books, National Lampoon, MAD magazine (and in our era, blogs) and become a good writer. It just doesn't work that way. It's like trying to get physically healthy by eating junk food.
But if it’s specifically about fiction novels, then sure, I agree.
I would however like to write a thing that I would like to read. (If that makes sense.)
I suppose we'll see then if that makes me a shitty writer. (Probably. But that could also be from having not written anything of significant length ever before in my life.)
I love reading so much I can’t imagine not loving it, but when it’s made to be hard when you learn or it’s presented as a chore it’s harder to develop that love. Teaching kids and other adults to love reading by reading to them and reading yourself is something every reading adult can do!
I have seen that to be a viable path to publishing many times now, as well as other benefits like building a community of readers.
The second problem is writing too much. I am reading a popular web serial right now to see what's all the fuss is about and all I want is to edit, edit, edit it into something more concise and refined.
Don't write YA novels that are five times longer than War and Peace, please.
If it's worth saying at all then it's likely not actually a parenthetical. If it's not worth saying, then you should cull it. Yours seem to mostly fall in this latter category, in my assessment anyway
Decide what you are trying to communicate and be sure that every word is in service to that message and that message alone. For example, you are discussing the practice of writing. That's why I'm in this thread, as a reader. In the middle of a sentence about finishing your novel, you mention via parenthetical that you're looking for an agent. Maybe the intent here was self-promotion -- you hope an agent or someone who knows one will read this -- fine. But if you can't decide and plan to use a parenthetical instead, know that the reader will be paying a dear cost: the sentence containing the parenthetical will be substantially more painful to read. Subsequent uses will be worse.
By that second paragraph, you blew your parenthetical budget, and yet you went on to deploy three more. Parentheticals need to be vanishingly rare as they are an eyesore. Yes, if you'd like to die on that particular hill, you can use them with stylistic intent. Go for it. But for the reader it will probably grate.
Reading gives you a flavor, a taste, a style, it allows you to occupy the thoughts of another human.
But getting your thoughts written down? That's writing, not reading. Actually practicing the art of writing is better for your craft than reading someone else's writing.
Matthias Wandel a famous woodworker on YT says it: most of his audience are watching for fun, they don't actually build projects. Would we expect a woodworker to get practically better by not woodworking, but by sampling others work? You might gain a little knowledge, but you'll never see your own limitations and where to grow if you never do it yourself.
Since music comes up in this thread, it's an even better counter example. The act of practicing technique shows you the idioms of each instrument, it shows you HOW to compose for that instrument much more than listening to 100's of recordings. Chopin's genius was knowing the human hand and how it conforms to the keyboard, he knew how to compose for it better than perhaps any other, because he was practical and a virtuoso himself.
When you touch and hear the instrument as you play, when you satisfy your own ear and judgment as Chick Corea says, then you're able to then better mimic others and create new fusions. Just listening to others "as much as you can" isn't going to make you a better performer or technical player at all.
Save the time for doing, not using. Use the time for production, not consumption. Practice makes perfect.
It helps a lot if you're obsessive and/or enjoy it a lot. Ideally both.
None of these are a substitute for talent, but likewise talent isn't a substitute for them.
Very similar to those "I'm making my own language with blackjack and hookers" announcements where it's obvious that the author has only known the Algol family (Python, JS, C/C++/C#/Java and maybe a bit of ML flavour through Rust or TS) without exploring the other ways of thinking (https://madhadron.com/programming/seven_ur_languages.html).
Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.
A real example.
I read A TON, since I was a kid (I'm close to 50 years old now). I used to write a lot. I even wrote two semi-decent novels, among other things.
I haven't written much in the last 10-12 years.
Now I want to start a little side project, in which I will write a letter to about one hundred people, print it and ship it physically. I have attempted to write the first one a few times, and it's very difficult. I am not used to write anymore.
Write more.
This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like using "shall", "need not", "take no exception", overuse of passive voice, etc.
My hypothesis is engineers suck at writing by default unless they do extra-curricular reading. I read a lot! But sadly it's often textbooks, journal papers, documentations, and Claude. I'm envious of great writers, but I don't have time to read Keats. I'm immersed in Stewart, Strang, and whatever Claude is feeding me next.
I find myself rewording things to avoid claude and chatgpt-isms. You don't realize how much you say "You're absolutely right" on a day to day basis...
Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to master and then make your own variant is way harder in writing.
On the contrary, you may have no idea what style means in the context of writing, so you can't fathom what imitating writing style looks like.
I honestly don't know precisely either, but a couple of things to mull over: Clarke and Asimov are said to have a "dry" style. Most of their novels are "story". On the contrary, Eco describes things in very minute detail (there's a whole chapter in "The name of the rose" that is the description of a door).
Those are examples of elements of style you may be able to reproduce and that aren't limited to wording.
In music, you have voicing sparsity, changes in voice count, preferred pitch ranges, tension/release cadences, embellishments, richness, playfulness, and a host of other characteristics. Rachmaninoff, for example (among other things), favours active, moving octaves quite deep in the base, extremely rich chords in the middle treble, simple (local) rythymic patterns, and expanding simple ideas like repeated arpeggios into large parts of a piece. He has more voices than other pieces typical of his time, though they tend to be combined somewhat simply when contrasted with counterpoint exercises and other techniques typically involving fewer voices.
In writing, you have sentence length, sentence complexity (they're different), typical volume used to express an idea, specific word choices, whether you tend to observe concrete or abstract ideas, the level of "truth" in your statements (in many flavours -- deadpan humour being quite different from a boldfaced lie directed toward the reader), technique choice used for signposting, willingness to violate "rules," and so on. If you picked even one project proposal from me at $WORK, you could reliably separate it from those written by hundreds of other engineers just by a few quirks -- habitually providing one level of motivation deeper than is typically expressed in technical writing (not just what we're doing, but what we're not doing and why we made that choice), a tendency to use British spellings and US words, a pattern of contracting any verb tense, sometimes with multiple apostrophes (e.g., "there'll've been"), refusing to terminate a non-exhaustive list without informing the reader that it's non-exhaustive, and so on. If you look at the reasons and motivations for one of those quirks, it's that I tend to have complete ideas (in technical domains) and want to express them completely and have found that every missing detail causes eventual problems -- only tempered by the fact that the requisite length tends also to cause important details to be overlooked on a casual read, which provides a mild damper on length. Understanding that motivation makes it easy to apply it as if you were me even when you don't have concrete examples regarding specific quirk/scenario interactions.
T.R. Napper explicitly states that you do in his piece:
> But I am saying this: go look at your phone, and tell me what your average screen time is per day. Two hours? Five? Seven? If so – shut up: you’ve time to read.
It doesn't have to be Keats. Start by building the habit (read in bed before sleeping!) and just read whatever you enjoy. If Keats seems like a hurdle, just pick up Pratchett or Tolkien.
You cannot read a book in 30” increments.
So yes, it’s very possible. (Even easier if you are amenable to audiobooks IMO.)
Reading as a person wanting to become a better writer should be more conscience of what they are reading. I often finish a novel and can't even remember if it was narrated, or how. That is not careful reading.
I've heard of authors who, went waiting for their muse, just copied novels they liked until they got back in the groove, and this usually helped.
Practice makes practice. Deliberate practice makes...
Because from the article: > One of the key things I’ve learned is this: there’s no real blueprint.
So to me it’s saying there’s a lot of different ways to cook this stew but it always requires this ingredient
The advice of "read more to write better" is incomplete IMO. I'd change it to "read/engage critically to write better". Else reading results in memetic ideas and tonality
In fact, you'd want to read less if it means reading deeply
Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.
Do you think many people will read Stephen King in 500 years?
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."
“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.”
Incidentally, having quickly scanned some of Schopenhauer's actual writing [0], I found statements such as "women are suited to being nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted" and women "are inferior to men in respect of justice, honesty and conscientiousness". If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/509571816/Schopenhauer-Arthu...
1. If you listen to tons of podcasts, you slowly internalize what is a good vs bad interview. e.g. you learn to automatically ask leading questions, direct the guest in an arc (if that's what you want to do etc). One of my guests was a professional sports journalist and he mentioned "How did you learn to interview people so well??"
2. I asked some more experienced podcasters what gear I needed, what format to use etc and they ALL said: "Just go start doing it! You will very quickly learn what works and doesn't and then just iterate from there."
Given that this was also an article about writing: a few years ago I was inspired by Twitter user @visakanv to start writing Twitter threads. I'm up to 200+ [1] which surprises me as much as anyone. Similar to the above, if you read a lot of other people's work and then start writing your own, you quickly develop a style. Having a style and people respond to it is fun and then you get excited about writing more and it takes on it's own momentum.
0 - https://alexpotato.com/podcast/
1 - https://x.com/alexpotato/status/2012723178577985948?s=20
An artist who makes art every day will run circles around one who consumes a lot of art.
I read a lot, and it means that I ingest a lot of interesting ideas. I'm not sure if it made me a better writer. Writing every morning probably helps more.
Most people never truly practice. They do things that resemble practice, but doesn't have the same effect.
My example is from pool: many players have played pool league for 20+ years without improving their rank. They "practice" every week by playing with their friends. Nothing about pool is, in my opinion, hereditary / "natural talent"...athleticism doesn't matter at all.
I became a better player than those others in a couple of months by focused, deliberate practice on the things I was worst at. Later, I practiced one skill (a draw shot) for countless hours--I was bartending in a mostly-empty bar. I became the best in town at the skill in a couple of weeks.
In all my time practicing, I never saw another person practice. People want to try all the other shortcuts and tips to avoid "hard work." It sure pays off, though.
[1]: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/what-not-reading-does-to...
> Insight #4: The best writers are the best readers. There aren’t any shortcuts around this. Successful writers read. They read a lot. And the best writers read a wide variety of books. It’s impossible to stress the importance of this insight. When aspiring authors ask my advice on making it as a writer, this is my most common first response: Read.
https://hughhowey.com/writing-insights-part-one-becoming-a-w...
> And I’m not even a good example of proper work ethic. I have friends who write, revise, edit, and publish a novel a month. Year after year. I have friends who have published over fifty novels in their first handful of years of writing. Both of my friends who publish a book a month make millions of dollars a year, and they are among the best writers I know when it comes to craft. I can’t put their books down. They pass like Messi.
Another thing is that I find myself using AI-isms in daily conversations more and more the more I use them to help me code. "Load-baaring" and "not X but Y" are phrases that I actively have to catch myself to avoid using now.
In journalism it’s called “burying the lede” and is the most obvious sign of a poor writing, IMHO.
LLM tropes are one thing, but before those came along you could easily see how someone working in a corporate office would pick up jargon there even if they loath it. Here on HN you can observe certain phrases and words which seem to be part of what some IT professionals use — like the horridly angular orthogonal used figuratively.
Reading prose written by writers who live outside of such bubbles (or who simply have a good editor in addition to their own filtering) is an antidote to that.
Working on stylistic issues is a conscious self improvement thing, but you leverage your many hours of reading when you're tackling that. Reading a lot means you unconsciously get good at judging which prose works well and which grates.
Then do the same deep dive for a different author. I may have made a mistake with my current choice, Jill Lepore. I can't tell whether it's her writing style or what she writes about, but it is definitely chewy.
Writing, programming, or drawing is fundamentally training on somebody else's work. Accept it, get better at it, and then move on.
Just wanted to compliment your writing. Though only a short comment, it painted a vivid picture in my mind.
This is where AI concerns me for people who are juniors in their field (software or otherwise). You get quick answers which don't help with learning, and it's very easy to never read the code. It's like a very tempting drug that stunts growth but feels like progress.
- The Great Garth Marenghi
https://www.garthmarenghi.com/about/
(If you're unfamiliar, it's a comedy bit about a bad writer, somewhat the opposite of a genuine role-model)
- William Faulkner
The claude generated text has something that I cannot clearly pin-point, that my brain detects somehow and immediately makes me feel bored. I can't keep up with the reading of a long ai generated answer ("reasoning") - it really hurts.
The same goes for writing - I always wanted to write both text and code.
The whole experience of getting into "the flow" was rewarding - endless nights (when I was younger) spent in that state, to reach something, learn something.
Now instead, the act of delegating thinking, writing, coding, and reading mainly AI generated text, makes me feel disoriented and more and more bored.
That people in general don’t read, I get. But if you don’t read, why would you want to write? Baffling!
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-m...
That is NOT the same as being incapable to sit through a general movie. That does not mean they dont like film in general.
Classic literature was written in an era when readers had more patience and fewer distractions than today. But classic short stories should offer the best of those, IMO, better-written times: more thoughtful exposition in fewer words.
Anecdotally there are musicians who in interviews report saying they "don't listen to much (other people's) music anymore". Well, that always shows. They get self-referential and repetitive.
I feel like some parallels can be drawn between the reading and coding brain in this regard.
[also, I can't also think about people who I know who talk talk talk (to hear the sound of their own voice?) and never listen... is this part of what he's implying?]
I feel a growing trend where books read like the author's main inspiration is TV shows, down to villains surprising the main character by jumping out from "behind the camera" and dialogue that reads like the book has no ability to convey thoughts and emotions except by having the characters explain them to another character.
Maybe I've just gotten more picky with age but I have a hard time finding anything readable lately. Sure there's the literary prize winners, but they tend to be dull and slow - I want solid pageturner pulp! :)
In good news for some, Chuck Tingle isn't the only name in dinosaur-themed romance novels: https://nerdist.com/article/pulp-romance-novels-meets-paleon...
And I don't think only reading "quality" literature is necessary, you just need to not mindlessly read the same thing over and over again.
I've found my enjoyment of all media improved massively when I stopped trying to find what made it bad and started to look for what made it good.
Though some techniques start to feel cheap, like how fast food makes everything palatable by being crunchy salt and sweet.
This is also why projections of AI's impact are overrated in some domains. Everyone can 'write' an app now. Relatively few will actually make one.
At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.
Yes, I added the editorial insertion because I'm sure that's what he meant.
I think the most intuitive case might be music. We would all be skeptical if someone said they were going to compose a soundtrack but hadn't really listened to many soundtracks or much music at all.
You can't learn what to look for in the writing of others until you write something yourself. And you can't find your own voice until you've tried imitating someone else's style.
https://nappertime.com/my-books-where-to-start-reading/
Follow it. No doubt sincerely meant.
But for writing, I usually see the advice that says you should read a lot instead of write a lot. What gives?
Reading as much as you can will not make you a better writer if you just read the same material and/or low quality material.
Are you sure you actually disagree with the article?
Operating these little diskettes that load programs straight into the receiver’s brain.
I feel like Joseph Goebbels of fictional worlds. Writing a code that will smoothly execute delusion - “This is real, this really could happen. I want to see where it goes next.”
If words are just source code for human brain then I wonder, when using an LLM - do you really program it or does it rather program you?
to become a good chef, eat a lot. to become a great producer, listen to a lot of music. to direct great films, watch a lot of movies.
these sorts of advices superficially soothe the reality that you're spending too much time consuming and not actually creating. or even practicing creation.
That said, good advice. Mediocre readers are mediocre writers. The reverse is not necessarily true. I've met many fantasy writers (hello Readercon!) who've read every damn series and then proceed to write yet another Tolkienesque knockoff. Their brains are pretty much like overtrained LLMs.
Additionally, the very next sentence is "Joking. I would never say that. But I certainly fucking think it."
Casual obscenity has become so normalized in the culture, you probably feel outraged I'm even bringing it up. Not reading has also become normalized in just the same manner. No one reads if they can at all help it-- not at work, not in parks, not on the commute, and not for writing. Their loss, of course.
We found it because of HN, but his audience - the only one's who's opinion he should give a shit about - are his readers, who presumably know him because of his (according to the article) Raymond Chandler-influenced sci fi. I'm willing to bet those people are not put off by some swearing. :-)
If you are trying to make a living writing you should a) be fucking reading and b) appreciate all the wild and wonderful facets of language.. like using a good cuss word for deliberately over the top emphasis.
Why? Because they do a thing differently from you? I don't see any harm in that, unless they're an obvious grifter. I certainly do see harm in fucking gatekeepers telling other people how to do X, and Y. Why the fuck do you care if they don't read? Because it ruins your holy image of the craft? Let them do their thing and stay out of the way, if reading is truly necessary to writing – they will discover it on their own, or just drop out completely if they never learn.
So you don’t agree with his one golden rule for becoming a better writer?
This many times. A great reader, who reads 52 books a year, and a writer has to resort to cringy "fuck you" to convey his thought.
I know it's a very bad thing to say out loud, but if even aspiring writers, those who care so much that they go to writing workshops, have stopped reading, it's a very strong signal that writing/publishing won't be a viable profession in the near future anymore.
But it depends on what you read. Take AI for example, it's trained on a ton of text right? It can write, but can it write effectively? Is its writing really "good" ?
The point I'm trying to make is, there's a difference between reading & learning from the patterns of what you read - and actually learning the best way to write - to actually provide a reader with maximum comprehension (If it's educational) or entertainment (If it's fiction/fantasy)
Best example I can give on this is - you can learn to swim from watching hundreds of people swim - but you won't be an Olympic level swimmer unless you learn from the best.
If that makes sense.
Nah I disagree. Humans learn via patterns so do LLMs. They are not human, they don't actually possess intellect - but there are some isomorphisms that can do cleanly translate. I think this one does.
Also, if in mice studies didn't work - we wouldn't use mice for studies - so your example kinda proves my point.
"Learn via patterns" is hopelessly vague. Archival algorithms learn via patterns too.
I tend to mimic the author I am reading, it’s annoying.
If I change the book I read while writing something, my text changes tone in the middle.
I am not a good writer, and I don’t read that much, so maybe that trend goes away when you write a lot, but it’s a pitfall worth knowing