To become a better writer, read as much as you can (nappertime.com)

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

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.

Because the idea of being a writer is more appealing that the action of writing

> 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But if it’s specifically about fiction novels, then sure, I agree.

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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).

Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.

"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.”

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

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...

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.

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.

Are you sure you actually disagree with the article?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-m...