How Reading Influences Your Writing

Practice makes perfect. But sometimes, doing the opposite is what helps you get unstuck. 

Lacking creativity in the kitchen? Go eat at five new restaurants and get inspired. Unsure what to create next with your sewing machine? Check out some vintage shops for a fresh perspective. And for all of the writers out there suffering from writer’s block, it might be time to pick up a book and get lost in someone else’s world for a second. 

Reading is one of the most important writing tools for many reasons—the biggest being exposure. Reading exposes you: to more voices, more styles, more structures, and more perspectives. This enriches you as a writer and a person. It increases your empathy, expands your comprehension skills, and as a result, boosts your own writing prowess.

Think about it: if you only ever read the same genre written by similar authors with similar perspectives, you’re essentially working with the same creative ingredients over and over again. There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you like, but there’s a lot to be gained from wandering into a different aisle entirely.

My favorite type of story is literary fiction: I love a good philosophical, character-driven coming-of-age. But I also read nonfiction, memoirs, collections of poetry, and tons of articles from journalists around the world. I make it a point to read writers from different countries, cultures, religions, generations, genders, and backgrounds. 

I love the classics everyone has read; I also love the random indie works that no one’s ever heard of. I’m addicted to it. Every time I enter someone else’s world, I get to see another way a story can be told.

When reading for variety, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to love all of it. In fact, sometimes figuring out what you don’t like is just as useful. Maybe you realize you love sparse, direct prose but lose interest in pages of description. Maybe a memoir makes you rethink how you approach vulnerability. Maybe a thriller has you studying chapter endings because you physically cannot stop turning the page. It all becomes information.

So to expand your own writing, I can recommend reading enough. Here are five types of writing I think every writer should spend some time with as a consumer, and what each one can teach you as a craftsperson. 

5 types of writing to read (as a writer)

1. Literary Fiction

My personal favorite, and also one of the best places to study what language can do.

Literary fiction tends to pay close attention to the inner lives of its characters: what they want, what they fear, what they’re avoiding, and all of the tiny moments that make a person who they are. The plot is quieter; it leaves room for the internal universes we are all living in. 

When reading this style, notice how the author communicates sadness without literally telling you, “She was sad.” Look at the way a character’s childhood influences how they behave twenty years later. Notice recurring images, strange little details, sentence structure, symbolism, and all of the things the author chooses not to explain.

Literary fiction teaches you how to make your characters feel like people rather than vehicles for your plot, and that’s a valuable and applicable lesson for any style of writing. 

2. Genre Fiction

Thrillers, romance, horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery. Where literary fiction can teach you to slow down and look beneath the surface, genre fiction can teach you how to move quickly.

Think about the last book that kept you awake way past your bedtime because you absolutely needed to know what happened next (shoutout Gone Girl and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). That reaction didn’t happen by accident. Somewhere along the way, the writer learned how to manipulate pacing, tension, reveals, conflict, and chapter endings well enough to keep you hooked.

Where did you start feeling invested? When did the central conflict become clear? How much information did the writer give you, and how much did they withhold? What happened at the end of each chapter that made starting the next one feel nonnegotiable?

You may never write a murder mystery or sweeping fantasy series in your life, but learning how to keep a reader curious is useful in just about every form of storytelling.

3. Poetry

Poetry is a completely different animal, because it doesn't have hundreds of pages to get its point across. Every word, syllable, and even the white space on the page has a job.

Reading poetry can make you more sensitive to rhythm, imagery, metaphor, sound, and the physical feeling of a sentence. It reminds you that writing isn't only about communicating information. Language itself can create an experience.

Poetry can also teach you when enough is enough. You don't always need another paragraph explaining what your character is feeling. Sometimes one unexpected image can accomplish more.

Read poems slowly. Read them out loud. Pay attention to the lines that make you stop, reread, or feel something before you've even figured out exactly why. Then ask yourself how you can bring a little of that magic into your own work.

4. Memoir and Personal Essays

If you write fiction, I highly recommend spending at least some time reading about things that actually happened. The truth is usually stranger, after all. 

Memoir and personal essays are particularly useful for studying vulnerability, memory, perspective, and emotional truth. A memoirist has an interesting challenge: they know how their story ends. They know which relationships implode, which dreams don't work out, which seemingly ordinary afternoons become important years later. But when they're writing the story, they have to bring us back to the version of themselves who didn't know yet. That's an incredible skill for any storyteller to study.

Memoir also gives you access to experiences you could never accumulate in one lifetime. Someone else's family, country, career, childhood, grief, obsession, faith, mistake, or completely bizarre Tuesday afternoon can temporarily become part of your understanding of the world.

5. Journalism and Narrative Nonfiction

Journalists have to take sprawling subjects, complicated histories, conflicting perspectives, interviews, facts, statistics, and occasionally complete chaos, then shape all of it into something another human being actually wants to read. Oh—and they’re often working under a tight ass deadline. 

Good journalism can teach you clarity and structure, but it can also teach you specificity. Pay attention to the details a journalist chooses to include. A particular quote. The way someone is sitting during an interview. The history of a building. A statistic that suddenly changes your understanding of everything that came before it.

Narrative nonfiction is also an endless idea machine. Read about science, art, history, psychology, crime, nature, subcultures, politics, technology, food, fashion, whatever catches your attention. The real world contains more strange characters, complicated conflicts, and unbelievable plot twists than any of us could invent from scratch.

Read like a writer, but don't forget to read like a reader

Once you start intentionally studying other writers, it can be difficult to turn that part of your brain off.

Suddenly, you're critiquing the dialogue, the pacing, the semicolon you would've deleted, the metaphor you wish you'd written yourself.

That's useful, but don't let studying the craft suck all of the joy out of reading. Let yourself get lost.  Let yourself fall in love with a character. Stay up too late because you need one more chapter. Dog-ear a page because a sentence knocked something loose inside you. Finish a book and stare at the wall for a minute.

You don't have to dissect every story for it to influence you. Let it be. And then one day, you'll sit down in front of your own blank page with a slightly bigger understanding of what a story can be.