At first this bad take made me want to cackle with laughter but then it started to sink in just how bad it is. It hurts like a motherfucker and now I must laugh or else it’ll be too much.
@convex-lens My opinion is that reading makes you a better writer. It helps you learn the craft and the ins and outs of the genre you’re writing for. I remember seeing people say that you can tell when someone is writing for a genre they don’t read because they think they’re being subversive with their story, but if they actually read and studied the genre, they’d see that these “subversions” are pretty old hat.
Also if you read you can break down the other author’s writing style and see what you think works and what doesn’t work. Think about what you really liked about their writing or how you would have done something differently.
The only advice one needs to become a better writer is to write and to read.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, though I do not have a strong stance one way or another. I do suspect the issue has more nuance, and a strange suspicion that for all the benefits reading provides writers, there may be potential disadvantages. What I would say, however, is that I am under the impression that you are both talking about slightly different things.
Op stated that you do not have to ‘’love’’ reading in order for your writing to be good, that reading is a hobbie of it’s own, and that you can read because you want to be a better writer, without necessarily enjoying doing so anywhere as much as you would love writing. That writers who do not like to read exist, and are approaching reading as a means to an end really. Maybe they recognize reading helps them progress, even though they would much rather be writing more and reading less.
You are saying that reading is almost necessary to become a good writer, which isn’t exactly something Op strongly argued against ( if anything they did admit that it was beneficial to read for a writer to progress ). What they think, is that you do not have to ‘’love reading’’ in order to be a writer, that you do not have to read constantly, not that you reading is all together unnecessary as a writer.
I wouldn’t say that loving reading isn’t a nice push towards reading more, and find inspiration/motivation thus refining your craft as a result. And I will assume Op is talking about reading actual published books, because I assume that there’s a correlation between the start of most writers journey and a few words they might have liked from someone else ( even though they aren’t within books per say ) .
