Writers tickle our senses and imaginations across space and sometimes time. This is how writing and reading work. For most, it’s a sensory and passive experience.
For writers who are reading, it should be more.
Every page we turn—good writing, bad writing—can teach us how stories work.
They inspire us to imagine what language can do. By diving in both as readers and as writers, we sharpen our instincts and grow stronger in our voices.
Reading isn’t a distraction from writing. It is part of the process itself.
Most people read for pleasure.
Writers read for a purpose.
Sure, we get pleasure, but it’s challenging to turn that brain of ours off.
We don’t just follow a story or the characters; we watch how the stories and characters are built.
When you read within the genre and style of your writing—cozy mystery, medical thriller, romantic suspense, fiction, nonfiction, short stories, books, or poetry—you train your subconscious in rhythm, structure, pacing, and tone.
For me, reading is like going back to school. Every section, paragraph, and line becomes a classroom.
I think writers are like doctors. Doctors practice medicine. They run a practice. We practice.
In this way, reading transforms books from entertainment into an apprenticeship, as we take what we learn and attempt to apply it to our own work and practice.
I like to study mechanics. When a book grips me, I find myself pausing and asking why. I’m curious what the writer did on that page or paragraph that made me feel a certain way. I look at how they introduce characters. I notice how they handle conflicts and escalate tension. I look for where they dropped nuggets of backstory and how they hid it in the story’s forward motion.
I want to discover how they keep me intellectually engaged while building the emotional stakes.
I like the sleight of hand they use: how dialogue can take the shape of plot or how the setting is portrayed in a way that works dually as a metaphor.
If you don’t do it, break down the ribs behind a story’s telling and look at what’s going on under the engine.
Once you start seeing the gears moving, write down what’s happening and reflect on it. Reverse engineer it. Think of ways you might be able to incorporate this technique into your current work-in-progress.
We are all a quilt of sewn influences: life, experience, craft, and other people’s stories.
I compare the process to collecting tools: maybe a clever narrative device here, a poetic sentence there, or a unique point of view.
When you break them down like this, you see them as individual devices. Mixed, like recipes in a dish, the techniques seem to fuse.
You break the recipe down to see what the cook used to make it.
Then you think about how you can put it back together.
Over time, as you read, analyze, and practice this exercise while writing, you find these techniques start to emerge in your own voice.
The goal, absolutely, is not imitation, and I’m not sure it could be because there are too many variables from story to story, but just as bricks are bricks, houses look so much different; the same happens in the stories you read and then the stories you create.
You learn these techniques as tools, then you build something that is unmistakably yours.
I read eclectically, partly because I interview so many different authors about their books and also because I have an intense interest in books outside my usual comfort zone. It’s like going to various restaurants where there is no possible way for me to get the same dish.
Reading in your chosen genre is essential, but I encourage you to go further. Your writing will thank you.
Stretch your creative vocabulary by reading outside your comfort zone.
I try to read at least one poem a night. I can learn much about language from a poem, just as a poet might learn something of structure by reading something a screenwriter might write. Memoirists can learn pacing from thrillers. Novelists can learn economy from essayists.
Just as your health is affected by the variety of what you eat, the broader your reading diet, the more balanced your mental and creative self becomes.
Your work and your thinking become more versatile.
Your writing becomes more inventive.
Innovation happens when you bring techniques from one genre or medium into another.
When my fingers are not typing, reading is writing in disguise.
For most writers, the most significant shift occurs when they stop seeing reading as separate from writing and start seeing it as a form of practice.
Just as musicians study scores and athletes watch game footage, writers sharpen their skills by absorbing the work of others. If you let it, the page you read today becomes a subconscious blueprint for a technique you will use when you write tomorrow.
It is all part of one major continuum.
Once you understand this, reading becomes a guilt-free exercise and one of education.
I have stacks of books in all the places where I read.
All of them are in partial states of being read.
I looked at the stacks and began to note how they arrived.
Some were sent by publishers for authors I’m supposed to speak with, but most are books I purchased myself.
This made me think: How does one start reading like a life-learning author?
Is there a plan?
Creating a reading list is usually a first step. But make it focused.
Identify five or ten books that mirror the tone, style, or subject of the project you’re working on.
You’ll see how other authors handle what you are attempting to create.
You learn techniques, but you also see what has been done before.
While imitation may be the most excellent form of flattery, we don’t want to do it when we write. Reading teaches us techniques, but it also guides us to be unique.
I used to mark in books and write notes. I don’t do that anymore. Somewhere along the line, that became sacrilegious to me.
Instead, I make “annotations” on my old-fashioned legal pad or my Goodnotes program on my iPad.
I note writing techniques that seem fresh to me and teach me something about character, plot, and theme.
Sometimes, I’ll even outline a chapter or keep a running tab on a whole book if it’s well put together so that I can follow the development of the story, see how things are foreshadowed, and see how the author has set everything up, especially when they’re out to trick me.
On those books, I’ll usually give them a second reading to see all the clues I was given and all the clues I missed.
Watching how other writers set up a story constantly improves my own writing.
In addition to the five or ten books that are comparable to what I’m writing, about once a month, I intentionally pick a well-reviewed book that is far outside my usual reading zone and even my comfort level. These always stretch me.
Every writer you admire is also a reader.
There’s no doubt about it.
They’ve walked through other writers’ worlds and adapted them to their own.
They’ve studied sentences until language itself feels like moldable Play-Doh in their hands.
They play it safe by learning what to do and not to do by watching others try, succeed, or fail.
If you want to write stories that matter, fill yourself with stories that already do.
Don’t just read for pleasure.
Read for purpose.
Read to be inspired, of course, but more importantly, read to become the kind of writer who one day impresses and inspires others.
One of my best reader emails was from a young man who said he dissected one of the children’s adaptations I wrote to see how I had veered and updated the original, even saying mine was better.
I can’t think of a greater compliment: not just that he read it, but that it had turned into a textbook for him.
Read, write, and maybe watch others do the same.
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