To become a better writer, read as much as you can
TL;DR
Science fiction author T. R. Napper says writing has no fixed method except one rule: read a lot, and widely. More of the aspiring writers in his workshops now say they're too busy to read. Napper blames phone time, which wears down the sustained attention that reading and writing both need.
The article
- Napper tells his students there is no single blueprint for writing, with one exception. Read as much as you can, widely and well. Anyone who won't shouldn't be writing.
- When Napper asks workshop students what they're reading, more of them now say they're too busy. His answer is to check your screen time. Two to seven hours a day on a phone is time you could spend reading. He writes full-time, works three gig jobs, has two children, and still reads every night.
- Reading teaches craft without formal study. Early beta readers told Napper he had used three-act structure before he knew what that was. He calls creative writing classes and MFAs useful for some. But he ranks them below reading.
- Reading outside your genre feeds ideas. Hardboiled crime showed Napper where cyberpunk came from. Non-fiction gives him raw material for stories. Poetry taught him word economy.
- Napper cites Maryanne Wolf's 'Reader, Come Home'. A phone-trained brain loses the sustained concentration that reading builds. The reading brain is also the writing brain. Writing a book is a marathon, and reading is the training. He reads 52 books a year and calls 20 the bare minimum.
- Napper sees generative AI as a tool for people who like the idea of making art but don't like literature. He doesn't dwell on them. For phone-trained readers, a few weeks of reading for an hour a night instead of using the phone will start to rebuild the habit.
Why it matters
Aspiring fiction writers who want the argument in Napper's own blunt voice should read the original. The thread fought over his profanity and asides, and the summary flattens that tone.
The discussion
Almost nobody disputed that writers need to read, so the thread argued over the qualifiers. The loudest pushback said practice matters more than reading. Others said what you read matters more than how much, and many described their prose absorbing whatever they read. Side threads traded novel recommendations, fought over Napper's swearing, and argued heatedly about whether a democracy needs a reading public.
Reading is not a substitute for writing
The most common objection was that you get better at writing by writing, as musicians practice and pool players drill one shot for hours. Lifelong readers said their writing went rusty when they stopped, and one noted that advice to read is far more common than advice to write. Others answered that nobody proposed reading instead of writing, and that the article's own footnote says writers must write. A few added that reading only pays off when it is deliberate, done to learn why a book works.
I've been reading a lot for decades. I'm a crappy writer. There is a saturation point.
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.
People want to have written, not to write
Many explained non-reading writers as people after the status of author rather than the work. Commenters saw the same pattern in solo game developers who don't play games, founders in fields they don't care about, and musicians who stop listening. Bobby McFerrin avoided other singers for a year or two to find his voice, but a reply noted his lifetime of listening before that. A commenter quoted Anne Lamott's 'Bird by Bird' on students who want to be published more than they want to write.
As the old quip goes: people don’t want to be writers, they want to have published a book.
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.
What you read matters more than how much
Several commenters rejected 'as much as you can' in favor of selective, critical reading. antirez suggested re-reading good books to see why they work, and reading the odd bad one to see why it fails. Commenters set a high school teacher's "garbage in, garbage out" and Schopenhauer's warning against bad books against Faulkner's advice to read everything, trash included. The same question drove a thread of prose-first novel picks, such as Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake and Nabokov, and a fight over Pratchett's plain style.
Read *selected* books, and re-read good books more often then reading new stuff, to understand *why* they are good.
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.
Your reading leaks into your prose
Commenters described picking up the voice of whatever they read: an engineer reading building codes started writing "shall" and "need not". Heavy LLM users caught AI phrasings in their own speech, and one person's draft changed tone when they switched books halfway. Some took this as the reason to read good prose on purpose, as an antidote to office and HN jargon. Others said prose style is harder to copy than musical style because its parts are hard to name, though a reply listed several.
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.
If I change the book I read while writing something, my text changes tone in the middle.
Phones, AI and lost attention
The screen-time argument drew the objection that phone time comes in 30-second scraps too short for a book. Replies cited Stephen King reading in ten-minute gaps and suggested leaving the phone at home with a paperback. A recent Atlantic piece on a 'postliterate age' anchored a debate over whether reading is an individual edge or a social problem beyond individual habits. Several people tied Napper's attention point to AI: model output bores them, and since adopting coding agents they rarely or never reach flow state.
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.
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.
Consensus
Reading is necessary for writing well but not enough by itself. You also have to write a lot, and reading helps most when it is deliberate and of good material.
Dissent
A minority called the post gatekeeping. People who find reading hard may still have stories worth telling, they said, and writers can find out for themselves whether reading matters. They also called the "fuck you, you're not too busy" line abuse, not humor. Defenders replied that the joke targeted a stereotype and was retracted in the next sentence, and that advising students is teaching, not gatekeeping.