> Why be a writer if you don’t love reading? Why devote your intellectual and emotional energy to creating a book, when it’s a form you’re not invested in? Why write, when you aren’t steeped in wonder of storytelling?
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 hope you publish, and I hope you tell that story. And I hope people read it.
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.
As someone who also dabbles in writing fiction (unpublished) I'm less pessimistic. I keep hearing less people read and the end of long form writing is near. To me this signals a great time to write and publish because the smaller the niche, the happier the people who get quality stuff in it.
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'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 (...)
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.
The mass is more than the sum of its parts, and if only a small minority exercise critical thinking they will be overwhelmed by the whole. As the great comic wrote - those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but those who learn from history are doomed to stand by helplessly as everyone else repeats it.
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.
For someone literate you should probably know better.
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.
I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book myself. I grew out of that but still felt/feel like I want to write. The issue that remains is that I’m just not sure I have anything to say!
Nicely put. When I read, "I always knew I wanted to be a writer", I always think to myself, "Oh yeah? But did you know what you wanted to write?" Anecdotally, it feels like I've seen that line in a whole bunch of early-20th-century biographies and journalism - back at height of the profession's prestige, perhaps not coincidentally.
Yeah. I've seen the same puzzling thing in game development. People don't seem to want to make good games! They want a hat that says "I made a game". That done, they want a hat that says "my game is successful", so they go on subreddits asking for promotion advice. Honest comparison with existing state of the art is seen as annoying; advancing the state of the art isn't seen as a goal at all.
I'm a bit of a victim to this mindset. I don't particularly play many video games, except the occasional one that clicks, but love making small game experiences and similar. I find that gamedev programming is very fun and engaging. Nonetheless, I don't think that I have the combination of skills and creativity (nor game knowledge) to make a game as great as those that have clicked for me in the past ;)
I was quite fortunate to have an AP English teacher my senior year of high school that understood this advice, and expounded on it often. I recall that he boiled it down to one simple line:
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.
“Read, read, read. 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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” - Faulkner
I also completely agree with this part.
However, writing is its own muscle that needs to be trained and sometimes reading more can also be procrastinating in disguise.
What helped me a lot has been:
Read a lot because you love it
Force yourself to write everyday, even if it’s for 5 minutes or you might postpone it forever
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 think because these people don’t see writing as a process, they see the finished product…either they don’t understand that writing isn’t just an action, it’s a synthesis that requires raw materials. Or maybe they don’t understand that experience isn’t sufficient raw material. You need experience and skill to create a story that sounds good and resonates.
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!
The first problem with web serials is that you write your weakest chapters first and release them into the wild.
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.
Please please suggest me some books where language and style of speaking sentences takes the crown rather than the story being the selling point.
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
I really enjoyed Josiah Bancroft's Babel series: start with Senlin Ascends. I feel like he enjoys writing sentences -- a strange way to put it, but, I think he does. But this is an extraordinary book on its own.
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.
Here's another. I focused on denser prose: prose that is rewarding to read because of the complexity of the language and style.
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.
John Updike. Better than average prose in all of his books, but his debut The Poorhouse Fair is outstanding. It may be too much for modern readers - not many explosions or super heroics - but even if you only get a chapter in, it shows what can be done with English.
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.
> Please please suggest me some books where language and style of speaking sentences takes the crown rather than the story being the selling point.
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.”
I really liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera because of the style of writing and not because of the story. The author goes on a lot of thought-provoking philosophical tangents. Here's an example from the very beginning of the book:
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?
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.
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. When I read that book I found myself rereading pages because the prose was so beautiful. No book’s has come close to that for me. I didn’t know you could assembly words and sentences and paragraphs so perfectly.
Thankfully, the story is as strong as the prose. Excellent book all around.
Easy. The turn of the screw by Henry James. Literally anyone who absolutely loves James primarily appreciates his descriptive form.
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.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, especially if you're into philosophical thinking. The way he blends it with a compelling narrative is masterful.
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.
It’s hard to know what anyone considers the “usual greats”. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature, but she doesn’t seem to make it into the “average” person’s greats list, possibly because her use of language is very much not grade 5. Try The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, The Grass Is Singing, The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, or the series that starts with Shikasta.
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.
Loved it. The earnest perspective of these monks can be very funny. Don’t know how to describe the rewarding prose except “chewy”, and this is a translation from Italian. Speaking of writing, the author’s extensive notes at the end are also excellent.
Read some mature Discworld content (Guards! Guards! is the best entry point, I'd say), it's an easy read too. Pratchett's skill with English would make even a tax report smooth and riveting.
No need to always flex with some highbrow stuff to find a masterful style.
Yes - he's popular for a reason, not pop, but that he deserves popularity. I wonder about being highbrow... in that yes you're right, that's how he's viewed, and he's well-known and it's fantasy and it's comedic and therefore cannot be highbrow (awful how we judge these things) but he has some very insightful ideas or ethics he wants to communicate. If, to me, lowbrow vs highbrow is about depth or insight, or long-lasting value in literature (will he be read in a hundred years? Yes), he is high, even if 'easy'. You're absolutely right, 'masterful' in 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.
A bit too reductive, methinks. Even if you're only speaking in the literature professor sense, the vocabulary and sentence structures are a bit more varied and exercised than in a "very ordinary" style, words I'd reserve for mainstream best-sellers like Harry Potter and other YA fodder.
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.
Well, I think the wisdom is too neatly packaged (basically: Vetinari speaks, so listen you pillock) and his simplistic views often hamfisted by shaping the world to make them sound Right^tm to be "highbrow" per se, but still, it's not for the idiot either.
> 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!
I find Sanderson very easy to read, the "style of speaking" just flows of the page. I'm not a huge fan of what he writes about, Ive only read a few of his books, but I assumed his style is one of the reasons for his popularity.
Since we are on HN, the analogy that comes to my mind is becoming a founder in an area you have no expertise or even sincere interest in. Not a rare phenomenon at all.
I'm not someone who typically reads books, so I have some perspective. Although I'm not the type of person who would fool myself into actually exploring the medium of writing.
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.
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.
I think there is lot of fair questions if such person is able to effectively write. And write in a way that enough people would be willing to spend time reading it.
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.
This isn't a real counterexample, but an interesting case is Bobby McFerrin, who wrote "Don't Worry, Be Happy". He avoided listening to singers for 1-2 years in order to develop his own voice/sound:
"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."
But are these game devs designing the gameplay loop? Or are they working on backend, like the engine?
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?
Having "difficulty, lack of motivation and concentration" for reading, but not for writing, doesn't make sense to me. It's far more arduous, and in the first place you have to re-read what you wrote unless you're throwing a stream of consciousness straight into the void/dumpster.
I feel like there’s parallels to be made for everything that has potential upside without clarity into the “downsides” unless you yourself get into them. Now when AI can “do everything”, everyone* (exaggeration) wants the potential upside of (1) being a software engineer, (2) being a write, (3) being a solo business owner, etc without wanting to put in the effort to learn how to do it.
I read a little. I suppose my own excuse for not reading more is that I am too often disappointed in the stuff I have read—been recommended to read.
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.)
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.
> 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.)
One tip: I suggest that you stop cluttering your writing with parentheticals.
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.
One interesting thing I've just come to notice is that ever since I started using AI agents, ive not had a single moment of 'flow-state' whereas I used to semi-frequently have such experiences prior.
I feel like some parallels can be drawn between the reading and coding brain in this regard.
I take breaks from AI agents and write a percentage of commits purely by hand, partly to keep experiencing the flow state, partly because I think I need the expertise.
I started a podcast recently and two things are VERY in line with this post:
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.
Speaking of gear, there are also a lot of people who will go out and spend $440 on a SM-7b, and then use it to record somebody (1) not saying interesting (2) who doesn’t have good speaking skills (3) in a room which doesn’t sound good (4) with a preamp that doesn’t have enough clean gain to record a low-output mic like the SM-7b.
It’s not like gear isn’t important but the SM-7b has become such an object of hate for me because of what it represents for podcasters. The “you will very quickly learn what works and doesn’t” is a much better starting point. (And yes, the SM-7b is great, blah blah blah. $440 is still a lot of money for most people, and it’s not $440 of ‘great’ for somebody who is starting out.)
I have an even better golden rule: to become a better writer, actually write as much as you can.
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.
A while ago I took under my wing so to speak the neighbor's kid who plays the clarinet at the local music school, but apparently has listened to very little music (at music school he only gets instrument lessons and some music theory.) I had him listen to a wide range of classical music, just to give him a taste, and see what interests him. I told him: a musician who doesn't listen to music is like a writer who doesn't read books. It's not only the craft, it's also the culture that those works embody, and the feeling of belonging to a tradition.
I recommend the thought-provoking short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card. It's a story about music craft but it's also a brilliant example of story-telling.
Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.
Thanks, I was going to make that analogy. Somehow, you can always tell when a compositor (or a band of them) hasn't explored music enough to develop their taste; and no, I don't mean that they should make ridiculous "music" like Jacob Collier's, but it does show in other ways, like a childish focus on virtuosity and improvisation.
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).
Just like how you need two legs to walk, you should regularly switch between reading and writing.
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.
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in.
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.
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.
Try it. Leave your phone at home. Carry a paperback book. Whenever you have time to kill and look for your phone, take out the book. See what happens. You may be surprised.
You can but at least personally I don't think I'd get much out of it if I did it that way. 30 seconds is only enough for me to topically skim the latest headlines.
I find it really amusing that there's a sort of standardized Hacker News style that we all follow to some degree or another. It's very polite and academic.
This style is forced on us by the dislikes. I believe everyone including me walks on egg shells while writing on hacker news. Becausethe moment your words evoke a frown on someone's forehead then you are in danger of getting a barrage of dislikes. And on Hacker News some if not everyone are treating as if it's a LinkedIn where some magical collaborator or a VC would view all my posts and comments and lend me a hand and say. He you are filled with interesting ideas and expertise with the "karma" to match. Why not work with me on n my million dollar project. Atleast that's on my mind. I believe that's what many are thinking too. But since Hacker News is basically software and computer people so their writing style would look like academic too
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.
"Style" is complicated to copy in both cases if you don't know what you're looking for.
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.
I think the issue here might be that you're familiar with what "style" is supposed to be in music, so you know how imitating it would look (rather, sound) like.
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.
Counterpoint: To become a better writer, write as much as you can.
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.
Any art needs theory, practice, and study of the greats. Unless you're some kind of exceptional genius talent out of the gate - and no one is, really - you need inspiration from other work, imitation, understanding, and practice of your own work.
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.
I think this article is conflating the craft of writing, which is essentially literary ambition and aspiring toward literary fiction, with genre fiction which is focused on plot and story above language that is employed. Writers who aspire towards a nobel or elite critical acclaim certainly must read because their aspiration is to develop a novel and masterful command of their native language. But writers who aspire towards story, storytelling itself is an oral tradition. The author here conflates these two, citing Woolf and Nabokov as examples of voracious readers while addressing a general population of writers. It is not obvious that the genre fiction writer is losing out by reading less compared to watching tv or movies. They would still be learning about pacing, dialogue, plot mechanics, and the ability to consume more stories albeit via a different medium may be net positive EV for them.
As a fun counterfactual, if Fourth Wing by Yarros was instead written as literary fiction, would it be more or less popular? My guess is, less. Which is again to emphasize that masterful craft of language vs. plotting/storytelling are distinct skills that do not face the same payoff or learning dynamics.
The most influential work of genre fiction (Lord of the Rings) is written in a literary style by a well-read author. How many people have even heard of "Fourth Wing" in comparison?
If we consider best selling, Harry Potter wins multiple times over. HP is wonderful storytelling and world building while providing exceptionally mediocre prose. And yet it's been substantially more successful.
Reading this article is like a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, I have to work with generative AI on daily basis and I have this terrible feeling of losing my ability to read and write - and think.
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.
To develop good taste you must try a lot of things. However it's a lot more important to actually try the thing yourself.
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.
Versions of "get better at [thing]" that don't involve practice are largely misled. There are rare times where you can read and gain a new skill, but largely you will have all the available skills, and you need to level them up.
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.
This used to be true because most published books were well written. I don't think that's true anymore. Too much noise and too little signal so to speak.
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! :)
“Read, read, read. 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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
Polite disagreement. To write (or feel the urge to write), you should have a point of view (unique povs are more interesting). To have a point of view, you need to engage with the thing in front of you. It can be a video that you disagree with, or agentic output you're belting into shape.
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
Indeed. As a young voracious reader I used to think that more reading is an unmitigated good until I came across Schopenhauer and his aphorisms. I try now to be more selective, life is short, and to engage more deeply with what I read.
"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.”
I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.
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.
Nowadays the analogy to “not reading bad books” is “not consuming social media”. Reading a bad book seems so much more beneficial to your concentration, focus and attention span than doomscrolling that it’s a valid recommendation. The bar is low.
This is attributable to survivorship bias and the democratisation of information. We aren't exposed to the 99% worst books, plays, pamphlets, and sermons of the 17th century, but we experience the dull ramblings of our fellow 21st-century citizens daily and through many delivery channels.
That is correct, but if we compare the top 10 literally work of the last 20 years to the same period 500 years ago... Do you think the quality has improved?
Do you think many people will read Stephen King in 500 years?
Many hundreds of hours of reading will build your vocabulary, and tune your ear to the sound of a good sentence. But it will not make you a writer.
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...
You shouldn't read a lot instead of writing a lot, you should be doing both, in the same way a musician should practice their instrument and listen to a lot of music. Or, for a more HN-appropriate context, imagine trying to contribute to a FOSS project without reading any of the existing code or knowing the style guides. Your contributions could be fine, but they'll never be good.
> 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.
> 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.
This reminds me of an article [1] (that I think I may have even seen initially on HN) analysing what writing looks like when treated like TV (consciously or subconsciously). It's a fascinating read and it made me more mindful of interiority in my own writing.
A lot of time I'm not very confident in what I wrote because I have a tendency to ramble and not get to the point quickly. Reading helps, but it's more about style, doesn't help me express myself more eloquently at all.
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.
Rambling is often an effective writing technique. Go ahead, ramble... then go back later, figure out where in the writing you stopped rambling and actually hit your stride, and delete all the rambling that came before that point.
Your environment has a huge influence on your language, which is why the advice for anyone writing given here (read, read a lot) is not only sensible but indispensable.
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.
I suggest finding an author whose style you like; in my case, it was Isabel Allende. Read their work deeply, effectively taking a bath in their words. Don't stop short of full immersion. Then, write using their style. Reflect on your feeling of discomfort when you experience how their writing style differs from yours.
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.
Rambling is OK as long as you can treat the result as a draft that you can refine. I've often written emails that were three paragraphs in the first draft and 5 lines after deliberate revision. And the shorter revision was always much better.
This is simply not true, even if it is commonly repeated among the folks that usually don't really write. Like how reading every source code that comes handy will not turn yourself into a great programmer, to be a good writer you need to: 1. Read selected books, and re-read good books more often then reading new stuff, to understand why they are good. 2. Read, from time to time, some bad book, and understand why it is bad. 3. And obviously you need to write a lot to become good at writing. And writing, in order to improve, is writing remembering, at the same time, the vibrations of the good authors you loved, and especially making the act of choosing of every word you put in the blank page, one after the other.
So you feel that reading being necessary to write well is not true, yet the first 2 points of advice include directions to read, to re-read, to understand what you read, and then to read more. And in your last point, to write while remembering what you read.
Are you sure you actually disagree with the article?
I see so many solo indie game developers who don't really play games and almost all of them fail to make their game actually fun. I'm not at all surprised to learn the same concept applies to writing.
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.
Of course! I don't see how anyone could expect to excel at a craft without also studying the work of others.
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.
I guess what you mean to say is ”read as much BOOKS as you can”. God knows I am reading all day long, but it’s usually news papers, blogs, weapons grade sloptonium from a colleague, etc.
I would say that you should consume type of material you aim to produce. So if you are writing for news paper maybe follow a few and check historic examples deemed good. Same goes for blogs. And really academic publications are very much this.
I think reading short stories is a great way to develop both writing and storytelling skills. A SS compresses the storyline and character development into a more palatable and succinct morsel than can a full-sized book. And the brevity of SSs should make them more digestible.
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.
In addition to this, I think one gets even more from reading after having tried to write. There's a unique feedback loop that starts happening once you start creating.
Sometimes I wonder if too much looking behind the curtain might affect you. Like seeing how the restaurant prepares your food. Or seeing that much of apple's look and feel is rounded corners.
Funny how this advice is totally innocuous and accepted universally, but the idea that LLMs are trained on the exact same material causes half of us to scream about art theft and plagiarism and a legal right to royalties.
“Quantity has a quality in itself”. How many books can you read in your life, and how faithfully can you transcribe them, vs. just retaining a fraction of them? What about LLMs?
Nowadays I mostly listen to e-books when I am doing house chores or driving or doing some other things that require the eyes but not the entire brain. Not sure if it counts as reading. If it does, then I read about 10-15 books a year. I haven't read a long-form book completely with my eyes for a long time.
I believe it is similar ot other crafts. You won't be a better engineer by only looking at source code. But it does help when you are analyzing a codebase to learn something applicable to your situation. So, it is not "just reading" I believe, but a subconcious act of analyzing.
Like with any advise that ought to get you expertise or ability, if you're not goal oriented, actively gathering and acting on feedback and hyper focused on improving, you will only waste time.
Wow, started really well, and then devolved into a mix of rambling, shaming people's usage of time, romanticizing reading, AI, social networks, and no true scotsman. Classy.
Reminds me of bill gates, who said to learn to write code, you have to read as much source code as you can.
[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 wonder if for many people today, it's not so much the art form of writing they are interested in, but rather having their thoughts and opinions validated by an audience. I mean, we live in a world where technology is constantly asking us to share our voice with the world at every opportunity. It's not asking us to phrase our thoughts well or to find meaningful things to share, but to get something out there quickly that captures people's attentions and to bask in it.
It’s the same phenomenon, but I got similar strnge feeling when reading an article from the atlantic about film students who are incapable of sitting through films[0]. Why would you study to make art in a form you don’t even enjoy yourself?
That article is about them not wanting to sit through long boring slow paced movies assigned in school. And they scroll the phone a lot. And they wamt to watch them at home, not in class.
That is NOT the same as being incapable to sit through a general movie. That does not mean they dont like film in general.
Good point, I hung too much on the headline. I guess there is disconnect between how film has been thought and how it should be taught now. Traditionally it has been building on top of the previous waves and often the avantgarde have beem the big cinefiles drawing from
history (someone like Martin Scorsese, who is now deeply in the history himself). But times change and simlar to knowing how computers operated in the 70s is not that relevant anymore as we now work on top of huge stack of layers maybe art students should also look more forward and not spend time with slow films.
I feel that people today are already overwhelmed by walls of text. Books are a completely different cognitive load for the brain. A book is a gym workout. Social media and news feeds are lazy reading.I try to read more myself, but specifically books.
To be a good writer - have something to say. To have something to say - live an interesting life. It’s not easy to live an interesting life by sitting in a chair and reading a book.
You need to read a lot on the homepage, and secondly, you need to develop your observation skills, especially to summarize your views from small things.
"Write as much as you can" is a more crucial piece. Reading is of course important for forming taste.
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.
Mostly agree, but one very small caveat—the books we all get to enjoy as readers have been through (presumably) beta readers, agent edits, and then publisher edits, and even then a line editor as well. All those hidden decisions you will not be able to learn until you do them.
"To which I say this: fuck you, you’re not too busy." What's with the abuse? Is that the hallmark of a great writer as well? Fuck this, fuck that. Pathetic.
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.
Perhaps what you're getting at is that being a good writer is not all it takes to make a good [art/story/work...], but I'm not unconvinced that reading is the key for the writing part.
You are quoting him out of context. That was directed at wannabe-writers who don't make time to read. Which is completely fucking batshit crazy. If anyone deserves some f-bombs, it's them.
Additionally, the very next sentence is "Joking. I would never say that. But I certainly fucking think it."
Who exactly is the advice for? For those who don't read, right? In that case, how does abusing them help? There's another golden rule about treating people the way--can't quite recall it, hmmm...
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.
The article is about writers, not regular people. It's explicitly directed at people trying to make a living writing.
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.
I'd say excessive prudishness is even more normalized, as you're clearly displaying here. Oh no, somebody said "fuck", my delicate snowflake sensibilities can't take it! How proper you are.
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.
uh no...it's not gatekeeping... because it's an article of advice from a professional to students.
That's called teaching. Having people who know how to do something well tell you how to get better at – even by doing things that are uncomfortable and not what you prefer - is how you learn a god-damned craft.
Any accomplished writer is keenly aware of the tone of voice they choose. So if they use profanity, assume that it's a deliberate expression. In this case, it's their way of expressing how low they think of the idealized stereotype of aspiring writers that don't read, rather than a particular person. It's very obviously not aimed at any one existing person. If you assume that this is a directed personal attack, then you're misreading the text.
> I would’ve thought the necessity of reading in this profession obvious. But I’ve noticed a worrying trend lately: aspiring writers who don’t read.
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.
I’m not sure your conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. There are aspiring writers who care about writing and/or publishing, and writers who care about literature. The formers usually are weaker readers. However, most of the readers don’t want to become writers.
I am not so much a writer but someone who loves how words can paint miniature splinters of reality.
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?
In my experience, reading can make you a better writer sure.
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.
> The point about LLMs makes even less sense than drawing conclusions from "in mice" studies
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.
> Why be a writer if you don’t love reading? Why devote your intellectual and emotional energy to creating a book, when it’s a form you’re not invested in? Why write, when you aren’t steeped in wonder of storytelling?
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 hope you publish, and I hope you tell that story. And I hope people read it.
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-...
[2]: https://archive.ph/Rpquh
As someone who also dabbles in writing fiction (unpublished) I'm less pessimistic. I keep hearing less people read and the end of long form writing is near. To me this signals a great time to write and publish because the smaller the niche, the happier the people who get quality stuff in it.
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'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 (...)
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.
That offers no solution to the masses, only the individual. The former its a much more difficult and demanding discussion.
How so? The masses are composed of individuals... who can commit to continuing to read.
Are you talking about incentives?
The mass is more than the sum of its parts, and if only a small minority exercise critical thinking they will be overwhelmed by the whole. As the great comic wrote - those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but those who learn from history are doomed to stand by helplessly as everyone else repeats it.
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.
For someone literate you should probably know better.
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.
As the old quip goes: people don’t want to be writers, they want to have published a book.
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.
I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book myself. I grew out of that but still felt/feel like I want to write. The issue that remains is that I’m just not sure I have anything to say!
Nicely put. When I read, "I always knew I wanted to be a writer", I always think to myself, "Oh yeah? But did you know what you wanted to write?" Anecdotally, it feels like I've seen that line in a whole bunch of early-20th-century biographies and journalism - back at height of the profession's prestige, perhaps not coincidentally.
It's perfectly normal to be drawn to a field without knowing exactly what you want to do in it.
"I always knew I wanted to be a doctor" ... "Oh yeah? But did you know what medical discipline you wanted to practice?"
Yeah. I've seen the same puzzling thing in game development. People don't seem to want to make good games! They want a hat that says "I made a game". That done, they want a hat that says "my game is successful", so they go on subreddits asking for promotion advice. Honest comparison with existing state of the art is seen as annoying; advancing the state of the art isn't seen as a goal at all.
I'm a bit of a victim to this mindset. I don't particularly play many video games, except the occasional one that clicks, but love making small game experiences and similar. I find that gamedev programming is very fun and engaging. Nonetheless, I don't think that I have the combination of skills and creativity (nor game knowledge) to make a game as great as those that have clicked for me in the past ;)
I was quite fortunate to have an AP English teacher my senior year of high school that understood this advice, and expounded on it often. I recall that he boiled it down to one simple line:
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.
“Read, read, read. 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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” - Faulkner
Do you think the masses have a taste for anything but 'junk food' writing at this point?
I also completely agree with this part. However, writing is its own muscle that needs to be trained and sometimes reading more can also be procrastinating in disguise. What helped me a lot has been: Read a lot because you love it Force yourself to write everyday, even if it’s for 5 minutes or you might postpone it forever
I agree. My wife is a poet and writes every day.
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 think because these people don’t see writing as a process, they see the finished product…either they don’t understand that writing isn’t just an action, it’s a synthesis that requires raw materials. Or maybe they don’t understand that experience isn’t sufficient raw material. You need experience and skill to create a story that sounds good and resonates.
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!
You could always post it on a web-serial site like: https://www.royalroad.com
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 first problem with web serials is that you write your weakest chapters first and release them into the wild.
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.
Please please suggest me some books where language and style of speaking sentences takes the crown rather than the story being the selling point.
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
I really enjoyed Josiah Bancroft's Babel series: start with Senlin Ascends. I feel like he enjoys writing sentences -- a strange way to put it, but, I think he does. But this is an extraordinary book on its own.
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.
Here's another. I focused on denser prose: prose that is rewarding to read because of the complexity of the language and style.
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.
John Updike. Better than average prose in all of his books, but his debut The Poorhouse Fair is outstanding. It may be too much for modern readers - not many explosions or super heroics - but even if you only get a chapter in, it shows what can be done with English.
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.
> Please please suggest me some books where language and style of speaking sentences takes the crown rather than the story being the selling point.
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.”
I really liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera because of the style of writing and not because of the story. The author goes on a lot of thought-provoking philosophical tangents. Here's an example from the very beginning of the book:
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?
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian especially. His style won't be to everyone's tastes, but you certainly can't describe it as bland.
I second this, CM is an incredible storyteller. Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels & made me want to write.
> Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels
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.
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. When I read that book I found myself rereading pages because the prose was so beautiful. No book’s has come close to that for me. I didn’t know you could assembly words and sentences and paragraphs so perfectly.
Thankfully, the story is as strong as the prose. Excellent book all around.
Neal Stephenson - Anathem is great and not an easy reader. I enjoyed most of his other books but that one was the complexity sweet spot for me.
Umberto Eco and Ursula Le Guin I agree on.
His latest one, polostan, may be the worst book I’ve ever read on the other hand.. No idea what happened.
Easy. The turn of the screw by Henry James. Literally anyone who absolutely loves James primarily appreciates his descriptive form.
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.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, especially if you're into philosophical thinking. The way he blends it with a compelling narrative is masterful.
> language and style of speaking sentences
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.
Nabokov is even more impressive once you realise that English wasn't even his first language!
It more or less was. He grew up in an extremely cosmopolitan household and was trilingual.
This has both: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65058/pale-lights
How far are you willing to go? If you want a novel that really emphasizes language over plot and character, read Ulysses.
I see Joyce was already recommended. How about Borges then?
It’s hard to know what anyone considers the “usual greats”. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature, but she doesn’t seem to make it into the “average” person’s greats list, possibly because her use of language is very much not grade 5. Try The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, The Grass Is Singing, The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, or the series that starts with Shikasta.
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.
The Name of the Rose by Eco is essential. Don't be fooled if you've only seen the movie, which was not good. The book itself is phenomenal.
Loved it. The earnest perspective of these monks can be very funny. Don’t know how to describe the rewarding prose except “chewy”, and this is a translation from Italian. Speaking of writing, the author’s extensive notes at the end are also excellent.
Read some mature Discworld content (Guards! Guards! is the best entry point, I'd say), it's an easy read too. Pratchett's skill with English would make even a tax report smooth and riveting.
No need to always flex with some highbrow stuff to find a masterful style.
Yes - he's popular for a reason, not pop, but that he deserves popularity. I wonder about being highbrow... in that yes you're right, that's how he's viewed, and he's well-known and it's fantasy and it's comedic and therefore cannot be highbrow (awful how we judge these things) but he has some very insightful ideas or ethics he wants to communicate. If, to me, lowbrow vs highbrow is about depth or insight, or long-lasting value in literature (will he be read in a hundred years? Yes), he is high, even if 'easy'. You're absolutely right, 'masterful' in 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.
His stories are beautiful. The language is very ordinary. (Not a criticism.)
I would absolutely call him a landmark writer, but I wouldn't call him lit fic in the publishing sense.
A bit too reductive, methinks. Even if you're only speaking in the literature professor sense, the vocabulary and sentence structures are a bit more varied and exercised than in a "very ordinary" style, words I'd reserve for mainstream best-sellers like Harry Potter and other YA fodder.
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.
------
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.
Well, I think the wisdom is too neatly packaged (basically: Vetinari speaks, so listen you pillock) and his simplistic views often hamfisted by shaping the world to make them sound Right^tm to be "highbrow" per se, but still, it's not for the idiot either.
> 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!
Proust. In search of lost time (caveat I’m halfway through book one) is a story in which almost nothing happens but it is described exquisitely.
Indeed. This is usually the go-to example of writing as performance art. So far I haven't had the courage to dip my toe in.
I have some vague memories of people praising the prose of The Name of the Wind but being less impressed with its plot.
I find Sanderson very easy to read, the "style of speaking" just flows of the page. I'm not a huge fan of what he writes about, Ive only read a few of his books, but I assumed his style is one of the reasons for his popularity.
I asked this question on Metafilter ages ago, should be some good suggestions in there: https://ask.metafilter.com/116971/What-are-your-favorite-nov...
Since we are on HN, the analogy that comes to my mind is becoming a founder in an area you have no expertise or even sincere interest in. Not a rare phenomenon at all.
I'm not someone who typically reads books, so I have some perspective. Although I'm not the type of person who would fool myself into actually exploring the medium of writing.
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.
If it speaks to you, it would speak to others. In the times of AI slop more so.
> I don't get it
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.
I think there is lot of fair questions if such person is able to effectively write. And write in a way that enough people would be willing to spend time reading it.
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.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is missing anything from someone who doesn't know/like how to read, sorry.
There's other mediums to express ideas that isn't books if you are functionally illiterate.
I'll resist the temptation to dunk on that last line.
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-...
Imagine instead the post was about people who want to make music but don't listen to it.
I literally cannot imagine being a musician who doesn't listen to music.
This isn't a real counterexample, but an interesting case is Bobby McFerrin, who wrote "Don't Worry, Be Happy". He avoided listening to singers for 1-2 years in order to develop his own voice/sound:
"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...
That makes sense to me. If I was about to write a doom metal record I'd probably avoid listening to doom metal for a while.
The difference here, as you point out, is that Bobby already had a lifetime of listening to music and appreciating other singers.
There are many game devs who don't play games. A lot of artists would rather be working on movies, and a lot of programmers who just love to program.
The best game devs all do though.
But are these game devs designing the gameplay loop? Or are they working on backend, like the engine?
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?
Having "difficulty, lack of motivation and concentration" for reading, but not for writing, doesn't make sense to me. It's far more arduous, and in the first place you have to re-read what you wrote unless you're throwing a stream of consciousness straight into the void/dumpster.
> 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.
Because the idea of being a writer is more appealing that the action of writing
I feel like there’s parallels to be made for everything that has potential upside without clarity into the “downsides” unless you yourself get into them. Now when AI can “do everything”, everyone* (exaggeration) wants the potential upside of (1) being a software engineer, (2) being a write, (3) being a solo business owner, etc without wanting to put in the effort to learn how to do it.
I agree with what you’re saying, but the original statement was “why be a writer when you don’t love reading?”, to which I can give many arguments.
But if it’s specifically about fiction novels, then sure, I agree.
I read a little. I suppose my own excuse for not reading more is that I am too often disappointed in the stuff I have read—been recommended to read.
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.)
> And I don't get it.
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.
I’m working on a whitepaper on a layover.
> 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.)
The parent post wasn't talking about technical writing. There is reading and writing for fun, remember?
One tip: I suggest that you stop cluttering your writing with parentheticals.
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.
One interesting thing I've just come to notice is that ever since I started using AI agents, ive not had a single moment of 'flow-state' whereas I used to semi-frequently have such experiences prior.
I feel like some parallels can be drawn between the reading and coding brain in this regard.
I take breaks from AI agents and write a percentage of commits purely by hand, partly to keep experiencing the flow state, partly because I think I need the expertise.
I started a podcast recently and two things are VERY in line with this post:
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
Speaking of gear, there are also a lot of people who will go out and spend $440 on a SM-7b, and then use it to record somebody (1) not saying interesting (2) who doesn’t have good speaking skills (3) in a room which doesn’t sound good (4) with a preamp that doesn’t have enough clean gain to record a low-output mic like the SM-7b.
It’s not like gear isn’t important but the SM-7b has become such an object of hate for me because of what it represents for podcasters. The “you will very quickly learn what works and doesn’t” is a much better starting point. (And yes, the SM-7b is great, blah blah blah. $440 is still a lot of money for most people, and it’s not $440 of ‘great’ for somebody who is starting out.)
I have an even better golden rule: to become a better writer, actually write as much as you can.
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.
I agree, learning by doing. Like cook food to get better, do not just read recipes.
A while ago I took under my wing so to speak the neighbor's kid who plays the clarinet at the local music school, but apparently has listened to very little music (at music school he only gets instrument lessons and some music theory.) I had him listen to a wide range of classical music, just to give him a taste, and see what interests him. I told him: a musician who doesn't listen to music is like a writer who doesn't read books. It's not only the craft, it's also the culture that those works embody, and the feeling of belonging to a tradition.
I recommend the thought-provoking short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card. It's a story about music craft but it's also a brilliant example of story-telling.
Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.
Thanks, I was going to make that analogy. Somehow, you can always tell when a compositor (or a band of them) hasn't explored music enough to develop their taste; and no, I don't mean that they should make ridiculous "music" like Jacob Collier's, but it does show in other ways, like a childish focus on virtuosity and improvisation.
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).
Just like how you need two legs to walk, you should regularly switch between reading and writing.
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.
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in.
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.
> but I don't have time to read Keats.
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.
Typically screen time is very scattered through the day.
You cannot read a book in 30” increments.
Try it. Leave your phone at home. Carry a paperback book. Whenever you have time to kill and look for your phone, take out the book. See what happens. You may be surprised.
You can read poetry in very short increments. And Keats is poetry
You can but at least personally I don't think I'd get much out of it if I did it that way. 30 seconds is only enough for me to topically skim the latest headlines.
Stephen King talks about this in On Writing. He carries a book with him wherever he goes and reads in 10m increments throughout the day.
So yes, it’s very possible. (Even easier if you are amenable to audiobooks IMO.)
I find it really amusing that there's a sort of standardized Hacker News style that we all follow to some degree or another. It's very polite and academic.
This style is forced on us by the dislikes. I believe everyone including me walks on egg shells while writing on hacker news. Becausethe moment your words evoke a frown on someone's forehead then you are in danger of getting a barrage of dislikes. And on Hacker News some if not everyone are treating as if it's a LinkedIn where some magical collaborator or a VC would view all my posts and comments and lend me a hand and say. He you are filled with interesting ideas and expertise with the "karma" to match. Why not work with me on n my million dollar project. Atleast that's on my mind. I believe that's what many are thinking too. But since Hacker News is basically software and computer people so their writing style would look like academic too
> I often catch myself imitating the flow, style,
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.
"Style" is complicated to copy in both cases if you don't know what you're looking for.
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.
I think the issue here might be that you're familiar with what "style" is supposed to be in music, so you know how imitating it would look (rather, sound) like.
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.
When new deltarune chapters come out, they definitely influence my writing and thoughts lol.
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...
Counterpoint: To become a better writer, write as much as you can.
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.
Both reading and writing are necessary, but writing alone is not sufficient.
Any art needs theory, practice, and study of the greats. Unless you're some kind of exceptional genius talent out of the gate - and no one is, really - you need inspiration from other work, imitation, understanding, and practice of your own work.
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.
I think this article is conflating the craft of writing, which is essentially literary ambition and aspiring toward literary fiction, with genre fiction which is focused on plot and story above language that is employed. Writers who aspire towards a nobel or elite critical acclaim certainly must read because their aspiration is to develop a novel and masterful command of their native language. But writers who aspire towards story, storytelling itself is an oral tradition. The author here conflates these two, citing Woolf and Nabokov as examples of voracious readers while addressing a general population of writers. It is not obvious that the genre fiction writer is losing out by reading less compared to watching tv or movies. They would still be learning about pacing, dialogue, plot mechanics, and the ability to consume more stories albeit via a different medium may be net positive EV for them. As a fun counterfactual, if Fourth Wing by Yarros was instead written as literary fiction, would it be more or less popular? My guess is, less. Which is again to emphasize that masterful craft of language vs. plotting/storytelling are distinct skills that do not face the same payoff or learning dynamics.
The most influential work of genre fiction (Lord of the Rings) is written in a literary style by a well-read author. How many people have even heard of "Fourth Wing" in comparison?
If we consider best selling, Harry Potter wins multiple times over. HP is wonderful storytelling and world building while providing exceptionally mediocre prose. And yet it's been substantially more successful.
Reading this article is like a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, I have to work with generative AI on daily basis and I have this terrible feeling of losing my ability to read and write - and think.
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.
To develop good taste you must try a lot of things. However it's a lot more important to actually try the thing yourself.
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.
Versions of "get better at [thing]" that don't involve practice are largely misled. There are rare times where you can read and gain a new skill, but largely you will have all the available skills, and you need to level them up.
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.
To become a writer, and publisher of work much like that of the blogger:
https://nappertime.com/my-books-where-to-start-reading/
Follow it. No doubt sincerely meant.
This used to be true because most published books were well written. I don't think that's true anymore. Too much noise and too little signal so to speak.
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! :)
There are more written books that a regular person can read in their entire life. Even if what you say is true, no need to only read modern books.
A sense of which writing is better is the very thing that reading lots of books helps you discover.
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.
> 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...
“Read, read, read. 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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
- William Faulkner
Polite disagreement. To write (or feel the urge to write), you should have a point of view (unique povs are more interesting). To have a point of view, you need to engage with the thing in front of you. It can be a video that you disagree with, or agentic output you're belting into shape.
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
Indeed. As a young voracious reader I used to think that more reading is an unmitigated good until I came across Schopenhauer and his aphorisms. I try now to be more selective, life is short, and to engage more deeply with what I read.
"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.”
I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.
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...
Nowadays the analogy to “not reading bad books” is “not consuming social media”. Reading a bad book seems so much more beneficial to your concentration, focus and attention span than doomscrolling that it’s a valid recommendation. The bar is low.
When you think about it, humans have never been reading as much as we do right now thanks to Internet and digitalisation.
Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.
This is attributable to survivorship bias and the democratisation of information. We aren't exposed to the 99% worst books, plays, pamphlets, and sermons of the 17th century, but we experience the dull ramblings of our fellow 21st-century citizens daily and through many delivery channels.
That is correct, but if we compare the top 10 literally work of the last 20 years to the same period 500 years ago... Do you think the quality has improved?
Do you think many people will read Stephen King in 500 years?
Many hundreds of hours of reading will build your vocabulary, and tune your ear to the sound of a good sentence. But it will not make you a writer.
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...
I think the premise of the article is more that it would be extraordinarily difficult to become a good writer if you didn’t read much.
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
Necessarily but not sufficient, yes
In my experience, the thing that makes your better at something is actually _doing_ it, badly at first and then gradually improving by iteration.
But for writing, I usually see the advice that says you should read a lot instead of write a lot. What gives?
You shouldn't read a lot instead of writing a lot, you should be doing both, in the same way a musician should practice their instrument and listen to a lot of music. Or, for a more HN-appropriate context, imagine trying to contribute to a FOSS project without reading any of the existing code or knowing the style guides. Your contributions could be fine, but they'll never be good.
Hugh Howey on becoming a writer:
> 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...
This is awesome.
> 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.
Reading and writing are related but very different skills. I think reading too much can be detrimental to writing.
This reminds me of an article [1] (that I think I may have even seen initially on HN) analysing what writing looks like when treated like TV (consciously or subconsciously). It's a fascinating read and it made me more mindful of interiority in my own writing.
[1]: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/what-not-reading-does-to...
A lot of time I'm not very confident in what I wrote because I have a tendency to ramble and not get to the point quickly. Reading helps, but it's more about style, doesn't help me express myself more eloquently at all.
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.
Rambling is often an effective writing technique. Go ahead, ramble... then go back later, figure out where in the writing you stopped rambling and actually hit your stride, and delete all the rambling that came before that point.
Your environment has a huge influence on your language, which is why the advice for anyone writing given here (read, read a lot) is not only sensible but indispensable.
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.
I suggest finding an author whose style you like; in my case, it was Isabel Allende. Read their work deeply, effectively taking a bath in their words. Don't stop short of full immersion. Then, write using their style. Reflect on your feeling of discomfort when you experience how their writing style differs from yours.
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.
Read their work deeply, effectively taking a bath in their words. Don't stop short of full immersion.
Just wanted to compliment your writing. Though only a short comment, it painted a vivid picture in my mind.
Rambling is OK as long as you can treat the result as a draft that you can refine. I've often written emails that were three paragraphs in the first draft and 5 lines after deliberate revision. And the shorter revision was always much better.
Rambling before getting to the point could be your signature style if you do it well.
Almost no body does rambling well.
In journalism it’s called “burying the lede” and is the most obvious sign of a poor writing, IMHO.
This is simply not true, even if it is commonly repeated among the folks that usually don't really write. Like how reading every source code that comes handy will not turn yourself into a great programmer, to be a good writer you need to: 1. Read selected books, and re-read good books more often then reading new stuff, to understand why they are good. 2. Read, from time to time, some bad book, and understand why it is bad. 3. And obviously you need to write a lot to become good at writing. And writing, in order to improve, is writing remembering, at the same time, the vibrations of the good authors you loved, and especially making the act of choosing of every word you put in the blank page, one after the other.
So you feel that reading being necessary to write well is not true, yet the first 2 points of advice include directions to read, to re-read, to understand what you read, and then to read more. And in your last point, to write while remembering what you read.
Are you sure you actually disagree with the article?
Not sure why you’re downvoted this much, as it’s a reasonable point of view.
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.
I see so many solo indie game developers who don't really play games and almost all of them fail to make their game actually fun. I'm not at all surprised to learn the same concept applies to writing.
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.
So that means that programmers should read/study the code and architecture of other programmers?
Of course! I don't see how anyone could expect to excel at a craft without also studying the work of others.
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.
Obviously yes, how can you design good systems without studying the systems created by others?
I guess what you mean to say is ”read as much BOOKS as you can”. God knows I am reading all day long, but it’s usually news papers, blogs, weapons grade sloptonium from a colleague, etc.
I would say that you should consume type of material you aim to produce. So if you are writing for news paper maybe follow a few and check historic examples deemed good. Same goes for blogs. And really academic publications are very much this.
I think reading short stories is a great way to develop both writing and storytelling skills. A SS compresses the storyline and character development into a more palatable and succinct morsel than can a full-sized book. And the brevity of SSs should make them more digestible.
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.
to become a better chef, eat as much as you can
Woah. Reading this blog post was like being transported 5 years back prior to the existence of AI. It reeks of pure humanity.
agree, despite the em dashes.
For what it's worth, the linked article has only en dashes. (I have no idea whether LLMs use en dashes.)
you mean, because of the em dashes? Five years ago I was happil using them without having to worry about this bullshit. sigh
Will reading a lot eventually makes you want to write? I haven't found that yet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me [write]."
Yes, I added the editorial insertion because I'm sure that's what he meant.
There are many more people who write, than who love words enough, to consume and generate great writing.
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.
Learned something new today, thanks
In addition to this, I think one gets even more from reading after having tried to write. There's a unique feedback loop that starts happening once you start creating.
Sometimes I wonder if too much looking behind the curtain might affect you. Like seeing how the restaurant prepares your food. Or seeing that much of apple's look and feel is rounded corners.
Funny how this advice is totally innocuous and accepted universally, but the idea that LLMs are trained on the exact same material causes half of us to scream about art theft and plagiarism and a legal right to royalties.
“Quantity has a quality in itself”. How many books can you read in your life, and how faithfully can you transcribe them, vs. just retaining a fraction of them? What about LLMs?
Absolutely. I write a lot, and I realized that without being a voracious reader since I was a kid, I would be a Neanderthal.
Nowadays I mostly listen to e-books when I am doing house chores or driving or doing some other things that require the eyes but not the entire brain. Not sure if it counts as reading. If it does, then I read about 10-15 books a year. I haven't read a long-form book completely with my eyes for a long time.
As in all art, the first step is to develop good taste. And you can only do that by consuming a wide variety of content.
I thought reading is not going to do that much, as it only improves your recognition, not your ability to actively use the vocabulary.
At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.
I believe it is similar ot other crafts. You won't be a better engineer by only looking at source code. But it does help when you are analyzing a codebase to learn something applicable to your situation. So, it is not "just reading" I believe, but a subconcious act of analyzing.
Like with any advise that ought to get you expertise or ability, if you're not goal oriented, actively gathering and acting on feedback and hyper focused on improving, you will only waste time.
Wow, started really well, and then devolved into a mix of rambling, shaming people's usage of time, romanticizing reading, AI, social networks, and no true scotsman. Classy.
Reminds me of bill gates, who said to learn to write code, you have to read as much source code as you can.
[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 had an odd sense when reading that article… the sense that we’re in truly bizarre times, that such obvious advice needs to be given at all.
That people in general don’t read, I get. But if you don’t read, why would you want to write? Baffling!
I wonder if for many people today, it's not so much the art form of writing they are interested in, but rather having their thoughts and opinions validated by an audience. I mean, we live in a world where technology is constantly asking us to share our voice with the world at every opportunity. It's not asking us to phrase our thoughts well or to find meaningful things to share, but to get something out there quickly that captures people's attentions and to bask in it.
It’s the same phenomenon, but I got similar strnge feeling when reading an article from the atlantic about film students who are incapable of sitting through films[0]. Why would you study to make art in a form you don’t even enjoy yourself?
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-m...
That article is about them not wanting to sit through long boring slow paced movies assigned in school. And they scroll the phone a lot. And they wamt to watch them at home, not in class.
That is NOT the same as being incapable to sit through a general movie. That does not mean they dont like film in general.
Good point, I hung too much on the headline. I guess there is disconnect between how film has been thought and how it should be taught now. Traditionally it has been building on top of the previous waves and often the avantgarde have beem the big cinefiles drawing from history (someone like Martin Scorsese, who is now deeply in the history himself). But times change and simlar to knowing how computers operated in the 70s is not that relevant anymore as we now work on top of huge stack of layers maybe art students should also look more forward and not spend time with slow films.
On the subject, I cannot recommend enough Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott & On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King. Two exceptional books.
I feel that people today are already overwhelmed by walls of text. Books are a completely different cognitive load for the brain. A book is a gym workout. Social media and news feeds are lazy reading.I try to read more myself, but specifically books.
To be a good writer - have something to say. To have something to say - live an interesting life. It’s not easy to live an interesting life by sitting in a chair and reading a book.
reminds me of the advice of unpacking your dreams in https://www.experimental-history.com/p/face-it-youre-a-crazy...
same is true for writing code : in order to get better at writing code, reading other people's code can help a lot.
Nice title fix!
"I'm one of the few people you'll meet who's written more books than they've read."
- 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)
You need to read a lot on the homepage, and secondly, you need to develop your observation skills, especially to summarize your views from small things.
"Write as much as you can" is a more crucial piece. Reading is of course important for forming taste.
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.
It's good to read widely, to understand what is poor quality and what strums the strings of the soul. Rejoice in this human communion
I mean this is generally true for everything from cooking to playing video games to knitting to fixing cars, observe before you act
Mostly agree, but one very small caveat—the books we all get to enjoy as readers have been through (presumably) beta readers, agent edits, and then publisher edits, and even then a line editor as well. All those hidden decisions you will not be able to learn until you do them.
"To which I say this: fuck you, you’re not too busy." What's with the abuse? Is that the hallmark of a great writer as well? Fuck this, fuck that. Pathetic.
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.
Perhaps what you're getting at is that being a good writer is not all it takes to make a good [art/story/work...], but I'm not unconvinced that reading is the key for the writing part.
You are quoting him out of context. That was directed at wannabe-writers who don't make time to read. Which is completely fucking batshit crazy. If anyone deserves some f-bombs, it's them.
Additionally, the very next sentence is "Joking. I would never say that. But I certainly fucking think it."
Who exactly is the advice for? For those who don't read, right? In that case, how does abusing them help? There's another golden rule about treating people the way--can't quite recall it, hmmm...
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.
the author's mildly profane remarks were an amusing expression of the authors voice that characterizes their perspective better than without it.
The article is about writers, not regular people. It's explicitly directed at people trying to make a living writing.
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.
I'd say excessive prudishness is even more normalized, as you're clearly displaying here. Oh no, somebody said "fuck", my delicate snowflake sensibilities can't take it! How proper you are.
> If anyone deserves some f-bombs, it's them.
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.
uh no...it's not gatekeeping... because it's an article of advice from a professional to students.
That's called teaching. Having people who know how to do something well tell you how to get better at – even by doing things that are uncomfortable and not what you prefer - is how you learn a god-damned craft.
Any accomplished writer is keenly aware of the tone of voice they choose. So if they use profanity, assume that it's a deliberate expression. In this case, it's their way of expressing how low they think of the idealized stereotype of aspiring writers that don't read, rather than a particular person. It's very obviously not aimed at any one existing person. If you assume that this is a directed personal attack, then you're misreading the text.
> What's with the abuse? Is that the hallmark of a great writer as well? Fuck this, fuck that. Pathetic.
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.
Instant yawn and instant dismissal; I don't want advice from a psychologically stunted man-child.
> Instant yawn and instant dismissal; I don't want advice from a psychologically stunted man-child.
So you don’t agree with his one golden rule for becoming a better writer?
> I would’ve thought the necessity of reading in this profession obvious. But I’ve noticed a worrying trend lately: aspiring writers who don’t read.
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.
I’m not sure your conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. There are aspiring writers who care about writing and/or publishing, and writers who care about literature. The formers usually are weaker readers. However, most of the readers don’t want to become writers.
You will be long dead before that happens.
Brevity tho.
I am not so much a writer but someone who loves how words can paint miniature splinters of reality.
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?
In my experience, reading can make you a better writer sure.
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.
The point about LLMs makes even less sense than drawing conclusions from "in mice" studies
Yes, the difference between humans and LLMs is the small issue that LLMs have no idea what any of it means.
> The point about LLMs makes even less sense than drawing conclusions from "in mice" studies
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.
Studies in mice aren't used to confirm something relevant for humans, they're exploratory.
"Learn via patterns" is hopelessly vague. Archival algorithms learn via patterns too.
Reading disturbs my writing greatly though.
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