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.
To become a better writer, read as much as you can
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Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#42Nowadays 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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#43Completely 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 u…
> 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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#44A 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 m…
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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#45Completely 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 u…
> 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 mas…
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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#46A 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 m…
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,…
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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#47Polite 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
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#48Polite 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 readi…
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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#49A 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 m…
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.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#50Polite 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 readi…
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.”