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The key to good writing is reading a lot


InvictusCobra

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A Portuguese professor of mine here in college told me that last year, and since, I've thought that while writing stories might be something that I find fun, I have no interest in books ("real" paperback Western novels, for example). I can gobble Visual Novels or Light Novels (did it just once though) if I am really enjoying it, but reading an actual book is something I only do when I am forced to do it for college courses.

Anyway, I am not doubting my professor's advice, although I must ask: Does not reading too much cause a person to reuse much of what they've read, thus causing their work to be a mix of cliches?

Is it just by reading books that one can improve his/her writing? Is reading a VN, a LN, the story and dialogue in a videogame/anime/films a good source of knowledge as well?

 

I would now say what I think. However, I am completely lost on these matters. A friend of mine says reading a book and enjoying the story in other mediums is different because books make you imagine the characters and world by yourself, whilst in other mediums, it's already there for you, someone has transplanted their vision of things and you accept it without working your mind. I disagree. 

What are your opinions on the matter(s)? 

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I believe we take into deeper contemplation an adage that seems so obvious that it has largely gone unchallenged. Reading isn't infallibly good. As Einstein said, "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."

 

But somebody who has never read a book obviously won't be very successful in writing, so I believe it would be fair to say that there should exist a balance between reading too much and too little.

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I don't know how it works with coming up with a good story, but if you mean writing in the purest sense (whether fiction or nonfiction), then I agree completely with your professor.  Not that reading alone can make a good writer.  But surely being a wordsmith requires you to know something about...well, words.  And by reading you encounter lots and lots of words and phrases that you might not otherwise be familiar with.

 

I've yet to meet a musician that didn't listen to music.  On the contrary, they always turn out to have the largest collections of music I've come across.  Again, not that listening to music can automatically make you a musician, but you get the point...

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Maybe it can help a bit but I don't think that that's the key to it...they key is... none... really, either you are good or you are bad, you can certainly improve or "refine" your skills but if you are mediocre or bad you wont improve by reading, I read a lot and can't write anything good... and I know people that dont read anything and can write amazing things in a few hours.

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As Mark Twain said "There are no new ideas", in the vast majority of cases everything you write will be an amalgamation of a bunch of cliches you've read. But the more you read, the more cliches you can combine parts of to make something interesting. It's kind of like if you tried to write a story with just 2 out of 26 letters. You probably wouldn't be able to do much of anything. But if you know all 26 letters you can write any English word other people have (or sometimes even haven't) already though of, put them together in whatever order you like and come up with something much, much better than what you could do with just 2 letters.

Of course, while you can't become a good writer without reading, that doesn't mean if you read a lot you will automatically become a good writer. I have no idea what else you have to do because I'm not a writer myself, but I'd imagine practice wouldn't hurt.

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I agree, totally.

 

However, just reading may only be half of what's necessary to become a good writer, I believe.  I find that writing is also as important as it can make you better at choosing what words to use and what order is best, all based on what you learned by reading prior to writing.

 

I wasn't really a book reader until just a few years ago when I started reading Cosmos and A Song of Ice and Fire. I did notice changes in the way I typed and I also started using words that I forgot I even remembered seeing in the books. It's by writing and typing that you begin to visualize and use whatever it is you recently read (I'm not saying it's like that for everyone, but it's what I noticed).  I don't only mean improving the vocabulary, but also mainly getting better at setting up the structure of the context.

 

Before reading, my only source were generic social conversations between friends in MMORPG's and from video-games that were heavy on texts. Those weren't as immersive as books from what I remember, and because of that, I felt like my writing stopped improving. I suppose it does always depend on what the initial content is.

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I'd say writing a lot is also going to be a major thing. Quite simply, you get better with practice, and you shouldn't underrate this.

 

With that said, reading is a p. good way of acquiring vocab, memorizing good collocation etc. Literary writing is also going to have a lot of words and phrasings spoken language rarely uses, and those are key to writing more efficiently and descriptively at the same time. As of current, VNs rarely have this kind of complexity of language (translators are rarely skilled writers either which will drop levels further), so you will probably gain less from them. Actually, you might want to look to the OELVN sphere for interesting writing if you're into that kind of masturbation circuit (consult Rooke).

 

I read a truckload of books myself until I found VNs (lol). I also wrote like four hundred blog posts of varying quality. I'm still kind of crap at a lot of things I didn't practice much though, and it depresses me.

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It seems to me that reading a good amount is pretty critical for an aspiring writer. Just like how artists will see something that inspires them or musicians might integrate some element of one genre or band into their music, writers probably rely on what they have seen as a basis for what they can create. And the vocabulary helps, too. But if you want to be a good writer, you'll want to practice writing a lot. I believe Stephen King writes 10,000 words a day, even if said words arent ever going to be sold. As for the question about visual novels and light novels... I think that they probably help, but you wouldn't want to only read those. First of all, I would expect them to be missing some elements of writing that other formats may be reliant on. Second, you're reading translated works (right?), so it's not ideal. Variety is good.

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"Reading is the key to good writing" and "a large amount of reading results in a good writer" are two completely unrelated.

Reading is considered key because of exposure; reading books across different genres exposes you to many different ways to express an idea or thought using the English language. However, without practice, a person who has never written in his or her life will never become good at writing because of a lack of experience. Reading builds the lingual base you need, and practice builds the experience base you need.

 

I don't think that reading a lot results in the overuse of cliches; lazy writing does. Writers don't come up with ideas out of nowhere (though some do write by the seat of their pants), and writing is nothing like making a collage; you are not cutting out characters or scenes from different works and slapping them together; you are taking a core idea that the plot is based around, whether that be a character or synopsis, and building on it. That is not a cliche. A cliche is just an idea overused to the point where it characters, scenes, and even plots can be predicted in advance. Good writers do their best to recognize and avoid cliches.

 

As for whether or not VNs, light novels, films, or other works of expression can help a person improve his or her writing, of course they can. But this is heavily dependent on quality; if memory serves me well, translated works have a rep for have sub-par writing in the form of adjective and adverb abuse, as well as unnecessary filler and a lack of effort to change from passive to active voice.

Films are a bit different; while visual media does not help you with reading, it does contain a lot of dialogue, and that can expose you to verbal cues and tics.

 

I do agree with your friend when it comes to books and imagery; A book uses only words to present a story. Light Novels and Visual Novels both use CG, with the former also having music, while films have actors to play the characters and don't need to be read. Only in a book will you, the reader, be forced to create a mental image of the characters, the scenes, and even the worlds by yourself, which none of the other mediums do.

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I would like to point out it's not the quantity of reading you do. You can read harry potter, twighlight and every book in Hunger Games (no offence to these novels though) and your writing can still remain as bad as some naruto fanfiction. Read something good, think about it, and if possible, talk to someone about it. I remember taking poem courses in university, and even though these poems were very short, they contained more inspiration value than many other novels I read. 

 

Reading and writing are not directly transferrable skills. I know some writers who don't like reading novels, and their writings are superb. Just read when you really enjoy them. 

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Reading a lot gives you ideas and examples of how it's done. To really be a good writer you have to write and write a lot.

 

It's pretty much the same thing with anything. Say you want to learn how to program, well you look at examples and start to get an idea how it's done. But you really need to sit down and write your own programs to really get good at it.

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I’ve been in the middle of a 3 day power outage, so I’ve only just seen this question.

 

People constantly misunderstand what people mean when writers are advised to read a lot, and in as many different genres as necessary. Writers don’t read solely for the sake of enjoyment, although if you don’t like to read you won’t like to write (generally speaking.) Reading is a writer’s homework and is part of how you acquire your skills.

 

How are you supposed to acquire your writing style if you don’t read? The art of storytelling isn’t the art of slapping down ideas and dialogue on a page, it’s about effectively delivering images to the reader. The better the writing the better the delivery of images, and writer’s maximise the effectiveness of this delivery through the use of language techniques. How are you supposed to know what works and what doesn’t if you’ve hardly read a book in your life? Do you know about redundancy and why excess redundancy hinders the delivery of the image? Have you formulated an idea of where and when you like to use adverbs (and when to ignore the rule,) which techniques you use to shift pacing? Do you admire a straight-forward and to the point prose, or a more wordy and poetic prose? And more importantly do you know how to pull your desired style off?

 

This is your homework and this is why you are asked to read. You are asked to read widely so that you are familiar with the tropes of each genre, but you read as much as you can to form your own style. Think about what you’ve read, what you like and disliked, what worked for you and what didn’t. Then you put this into practice by writing as much as you can.

 

Stephen King:

 

– “Master the art of description - Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s,” writes King. The important part isn’t writing enough, but limiting how much you say. Visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things “in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,” he says.

 

The key to good description is clarity, both in observation and in writing. Use fresh images and simple vocabulary to avoid exhausting your reader. “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling,” notes King.

 

As you can see, this advice is littered with opinions he’s formed himself. The idea that you don’t write long paragraphs, and use simple vocabulary, is a question of style not a rule - many authors use pretentious vocabulary and ¾ page paragraphs. But it’s an opinion he’s formed himself through study and reading, and is an insight into how he formed his style This is what writer’s do.The question is, how can you form your own opinions about style if you don’t read? How can you control your style, and your delivery, when you don’t know what you’re doing or what you want to do?

 

Stephen King:

 

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

 

Looky looky, another one. Once again this isn't a hard and fast rule, but something he's formed an opinion on through a lot of reading, and he then used this opinion to refine his own style. He obviously hates when writers get carried away in the prose, which contributed to his shorter descriptive style. He would have further studied and formed opinions on how to pull that off. Later on in a writer's career that sort of stuff would probably become automatic, but at the beginning you need to think and refine. You also can't use these rules to give yourself a short-cut to writing well, these are the thought processes he went through on his journey to become a writer. 

 

Also beware reading only VN’s and LN’s. Most of these are translated from Japanese and employ many language techniques frowned upon in the West. Japanese prose in LNs and VNs, from what I've seen, seems to use a lot of tell and an overuse of modifying words. Videogames, anime, and films give you no indication of how you write prose.

 

I wouldn’t worry about clichés. A good story has little to do with how original your ideas are, it’s more to do with how you implement them. 

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Interestingly enough, you might not need to keep consuming voraciously once you've kinda established your own style. I say that mainly because I was surprised to learn in an interview with three mangaka well known for their creativity and their out-of-ordinary works (Taiyou Matsumoto (Ping-pong, Tekkon Kinkreet), Inio Asano (Punpun, a bunch of great short manga like Solanin), and a third one whose name I forgot) that they didn't really read any manga nowadays.

 

I guess being diverse in your tastes is key though.

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^Ohh so that's where Professor Rooke has been all this time.

Hopefully you had your students' essays to grade and keep you company :P

 

Yeah, massive storms :(. I burned them all for warmth :P

 

Interestingly enough, you might not need to keep consuming voraciously once you've kinda established your own style.

 

It’s really only at the start where it’s considered almost mandatory. Once you’ve established your own style some writers stop reading at all, or if you’re Patrick Rothfuss you still take any opportunity you can to sneak away with a good book.

 

Hmmm, I've always wondered why large sections of the public think people can write and write well without any study or thought or passion going into the craft. People are resigned to artists having to study technique and learn how to draw, to chefs having to study technique and learn how to cook, and they acknowledge that these people draw inspiration on technique and subject matter from others throughout their life. But when it comes to writing people think just being fluent in the language is enough. It’s not, and it’s really no different to any other craft. People tend to look down on writing as a skill, but being able to write well takes a lot of work and thought.

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Hmmm, I've always wondered why large sections of the public think people can write and write well without any study or thought or passion going into the craft. People are resigned to artists having to study technique and learn how to draw, the same with chefs, and they acknowledge that they draw inspiration on technique and subject matter from others throughout their life. But when it comes to writing people think just being fluent in the language is enough. It’s not, and it’s really no different to any other craft. People tend to look down on writing as a skill, but being able to write well takes a lot of work and thought.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that you can usually tell at a glance that a painting is shit (unless the painter decides it's modern art), but if you have a text that isn't riddled with typos and grammatical errors it isn't as easy, especially if you don't read much.

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More like, read a lot, write even more. Not everyone is a born writer; some people have it easier, but everyone can write. The key lies in developing your own inner voice and a set of tools. There's also imagination, which plays a huge role in everything you pour down onto paper, but isn't necesarilly tied to anything. The rest is a matter of constant practice. You'll know when it happens, because it's magic that often changes your life.

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Rooke and I come from two schools of thought regarding writing.   Rooke heavily focuses on style.  I focus more on content.  Depending on which is more important to you, the method of improvement will differ.

 

For style, I can't really argue with Rooke.  All you can really do is model after others.

 

Content however is different.  Content is about ideas, and ideas may come from many sources.  Originality is extremely valuable, so being able to consider a given topic and offer a unique perspective is a gift of sorts that comes from knowing a little about a lot of different things and being able to do your own independent research.  That applies to both fiction and nonfiction writing.  A writer who focuses on content values clarity and brevity.  Technical writing really helps build this skill.  A content focus is about expertise.  You have to know your topic inside out.  That means anticipating the questions your audience will have and having an answer ready.  A good content writer gives the appearance of being all-knowing.  That's not really true--they simply are thinking two steps ahead of everyone else.

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