Good Writers are Good Readers. Good Advice?
The slipperiness of “good” advice
Taking advice is a strange pursuit isn’t it?
It seems simple enough: You want to know something, you go to someone who is experienced in that thing. You listen to what they have to say. This hopefully helps you avoid making similar mistakes and hopefully fast tracks your own journey down that already charted road.
But in practice?
It depends heavily on the person handing it out, why they’re handing it out, and whether you’re ready to hear to it.
Even when you’re a willing listener and you’re eager to learn, advice doesn’t sink in by default.
You might seek out a credible expert asking advice on a specific topic and in turn you might receive the most sound instruction known to man. Yet often it’s not until you walk right into the low hanging doorway they were warning you about, that their words actually break through.
Other times a nugget of truth overheard from a mouth that was just chewing on a big mac pulled out of a roadside bin will inject you with insights you’ve got no business carrying.
Brains are strange, learning is strange, so I personally approach each new scrap of advice I receive like it’s a strange dog that I haven’t quite figured out yet. Assuming it’s trained, but maintaining a bit of healthy distance—ready for it to nip or piss on the carpet at any moment.
Perhaps a better simile is my approach to taking supplements. I’m the perfect target consumer for each new wave of health supplement that floats into the zeitgeist. I’m constantly (well when I’ve got money) getting fired up on the life optimizing benefits that this new mushroom blend is going to infuse me with— and for the most part it works. I’m healthier than most. I feel good most of the time. But because I’m on four or five of these supplements at a given time its hard to parse out which one (if any) of these supplements is responsible for my good mood, or if it’s simply the act of taking a supplement that is feeding me a placebo.
I treat advice in the same way, I’ll often stack my protocol up with advice that seems good, hoping it’s doing its job at a sub detectible level.
One such piece of advice is: “Good writers are good readers.”
Good Writers are Good Readers
On the face of it this advice makes sense.
Input vs output right? If you are consuming high quality writing it’s got to sink into your brain at a certain put. Likewise, if you’re consuming slop the opposite will happen.
Also.
You can’t write from a vacuum, so you’ve got to feed your mind with references to draw on, connect and repackage in novel ways. That’s what creativity is at the end of the day.
Both of these angles are logical. So I regularly took this advice like it was a magnesium pill. Reading a wide range, trying to familiarize myself with “quality,” trying to avoid bad writing (though tasting it every so often just to remind myself that this shit also gets published is not always the worst thing to do.)
And I didn’t really notice much.
In hindsight my approach was likely too passive. I was reading at high volume without dissecting the work, the structure, the effect it was having on me as a reader, why I was being effected in this way.
But then again, perhaps it wasn’t too passive, because at a certain point, this approach to reading reached a critical mass. It became a habit, which I think freed up a certain amount of mental space for me, then I started noticing all the above automatically. Noticing details of structure, noticing how an author has drawn out a certain emotion, and none of this takes effort, I’ve trained it in.
Now it feels passive, yet these details will pop out at me without much effort from my side.
Proof of Concept
The real proof that this advice “Good Writers are Good Readers” was sound came two weeks ago at my writers’ group. I was reading a scene that I originally wrote over twelve months ago. I was short on time and didn’t have a chance to edit or proof read this particular extract before I took it to the group. My memory of it was as a snappy, engaging scene, so I was fairly confident I’d be fine.
But twelve months is a long time. I’ve developed my prose style (hmmm that feels a bit gross to say) significantly since then.
When I stood up to read this “engaging” scene, I found myself stuttering over jagged sentences, having to hold my breath to reach the end of some of them and fighting rephrase my wording in real time. While the other members of the group didn’t notice (or share) any significant negatives about this particular scene, in my mind, I bombed.
I think this was an instance of the Louis Armstrong effect. “I miss one day of practice, I notice. I miss two days of practice the band notices. I miss three days of practice, the audience notices.”1
When judged against formal objective standards, this wasn’t bad writing.
It was only a bad night for me.
Yet, this was possibly the biggest breakthrough I’ve had since joining that group, because it showed me the real benefit of the Good Writers are Good Readers practice.
Standing up there, embarrassed to put this scene to my name, I realised that the advice I’d been following didn’t have anything to do with consuming “quality writing” in the culturally approved sense, it’s about consuming quality in the taste sense. Personal taste.
See while reading widely is a good starting point. The key detail in this practice is the discovery of your own personal taste. Actively engaging in stretching and honing of that taste via broad exposure is the entire goal.
When I stood up and cringed at every word, it wasn’t a case of the writing being bad, it was a case of it being mismatched with my taste.
My reading has honed my ear to what sounds good to me. In the last twelve months, I’ve narrowed down what type of writing, rhythm, cadence sounds good to me and my former style was failing to measure up under this criteria.
That’s what reading does for you. It’s a filtering system of exposure and dismissal.
At the end of the day that’s what style is.
So if I had the gall to throw around advice on this topic, I’d suggest:
Step One: Read everything you can without discrimination.
Step Two: Once you’ve got a good base of classics and critically acclaimed numbers under your belt2, follow your nose to books that draw you in (while being conscious not to avoid anything just because it’s challenging).
Step Three: Keep reading, don’t think too hard about it. Just get those words inside your head.
Step Four: Maybe maintain a light practice of reading critical analysis of certain authors/techniques (but don’t consciously apply any of it, just get that in your head as well)
Step Five: Enjoy the results. Don’t try to pin down whether this was the Lion’s mane or the L-Theanine that’s doing the job. Just maintain the practice.
That’s my advice. Take it, don’t take it. I appreciate that the approach I’ve just described leans on a lot of “faith” which is eerily close to some new age bullshit. But it works for me, so do with that what you want.
I’ve looked into this quote and while it’s been attributed to Louis Armstrong, there aren’t any examples of him actually saying it. But the point holds.
(this isn’t the same thing as best seller by the way)