Reading to Write
I imagine that, for most authors, the urge to write comes from reading. My earliest attempt came from having read a story and wanting to emulate it. There is something about the cognitive process that, for writers and would-be writers, makes the act of reading equate almost directly with writing.
Unfortunately, our cognitive process blithely glosses over an important fact: that writing a book is an order of magnitude harder than reading one. That single issue has broken the will of more than one would-be novelist over the years. We probably all know someone who, flush with the pleasure of having finished a really good book, has bought a new laptop, a shelf-full of Writers Digest guides, and sat down to knock out their first novel in a weekend…only to give it up before Monday morning.
But that doesn’t mean that the original impulse—to read in order to write—was unfounded. To be a good writer, you have to continue to read and, in fact, improve as a reader if you want to be successful.
