As a life-long reader since high school, I was shocked when I read two Pew Research Center reports. The first report, in 2016, said that the median person in the U.S. reads just 4 books in a year. Following up on that, the second Pew Research Center report in 2021 found that 23% of people in the U.S. haven’t read a book in whole or part in the last year, and that includes print, electronic, and audio books.
Shocked might not be a sufficiently impactful word. I don’t know that a word exists to describe my level of shock. I barely go a day without reading. Even as I write this blog post, I am on streak on my Kindle of reading 181 days in a row, and reading 218 weeks in a row.
Then, I read another piece, that I have lost the reference to, that stated that the average person in the U.S. reads less than 1 book related to their profession. In fact, the per capita number was like 0.27 books. This wasn’t all that surprising. I suspected that the first Pew report was strongly slanted towards people reading for pleasure.
At first glance, this is great news for those who want to write for the Science Fiction and Fantasy market. That would mean, using some basic math (4 books total – 0.27 books in the profession), that, overall, I have a nearly 14x higher chance to have someone read my book of science fiction or fantasy than if I had written a non-fiction book. YAY!
I quickly realized that writers were not immune to the same reading deficits. In fact, in 2000, Stephen King (who has written a few books you may have heard about), wrote this,
“Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
This is a great quote, and one that is often requoted. But, I actually remember a quote from a few pages earlier, which is,
“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.”
Why would Stephen King take the time to write something that was, to me, so completely obvious? Because, as he states, he regularly encounters aspiring writers who claimed they don’t have time to read.
But, don’t just take Stephen King’s word for it. Here are quotes from William Faulkner and Tony Hillerman. I also included a quote from André Maurois, who is not as well known, but was a prolific writer.
“Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out.”
“When I was teaching writing — and I still say it — I taught that the best way to learn to write is by reading. Reading critically, noticing paragraphs that get the job done, how your favorite writers use verbs, all the useful techniques. A scene catches you? Go back and study it. Find out how it works.”
“Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original and by destroying one’s first productions.”
What is really interesting about the quotes is that, aside from André Maurois, there are no prescriptions for what to read. Even Maurois is vague in recommending reading great authors, without even proposing at least a few to that list.
In fact, I love Faulkner’s recommendation to read trash. It always makes me chuckle to think of Faulkner reading a trashy paperback while contemplating his Nobel Prize. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a story, probably a short story, in just that idea.
So next time you have time to improve your writing, you might want to spend it reading. Heck, spend time reading just for the pleasure of it, and you’ll likely find your writing improves just from the exposure. So get out there and make your writing better by reading more!