The Best Way to Learn to Write Is by Reading

A major way I improved my writing was by reading other people’s work

Growing up I always had a book in my hand, just like I always had some awful haircut I was copying from Justin Bieber. I read so much that I never saw myself doing anything but being a writer when I grew up. To my credit, I didn't veer too far from my dream of being a writer.

During undergrad, I studied composition and rhetoric, and my full-time job is now working in entertainment public relations. My relationship with writing, and finding a life where I could live off it, remained steadfast just like my love of reading. And no matter what space or industry I was in, I was always told to read if I wanted to be a better writer.

Reading is both one of my greatest tools and instructors in building my faculties with written text. One of the greatest writing classes I ever took wasn’t one that looked at grammar, rather it was my course on memoirs. In a class committed to the culture of reading, I grew more as a writer than I ever did just learning about grammar and style. Reading others' works offers invaluable lessons in how writers can both learn the rules and break them.

For example, when I read Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir I not only learned how to write in this genre but I also learned how to write about it. Developing discourse is not an easy task. For writers, we often straddle writing in a specialist and a generalist form about a subject. Through embracing other author's text I learned that a good writer not only writes well about a particular subject, they also know how to write about it.

When I knew I wanted to work in entertainment my career mentor told me, “You need to read the trades. Know the pulse of the industry and have something to say about it.” That nugget of advice changed my life. The more I read about the industry the more I grew an opinion about it. Reading invited me into a foreign world. Even though I had zero experience in this field, I knew the terms and topics that were going on.

While my example is a bit specific, this advice can benefit everyone because we never know what we can learn from reading new writers. When bookstores were still open, I committed my Saturdays to peruse the shelves of different genres. I’d read some books on philosophy, fashion, and fiction. These are all areas of interest and each page enriched me with ideas. Whether I learned a new word, or I noticed an interesting sentence style, there was always something newly discovered. Reading keeps you on your toes because it shows you how some people have mastered the language.

Even when we write we must acknowledge that our ideas are not original. However, the more you read the more likely you are to find that space where your idea can flourish. Maybe what sets you apart is that you have a different style of writing, or maybe you're contrary to the voices in the conversation. You can only know what makes you unique by seeing if it exists already through reading.

I read for both leisure and information. Every morning, I skim the newspaper for important headlines that could impact my day. By the evening, I’m confusing a chapter of whatever book is on my nightstand. Sometimes these books are memoirs, sometimes they’re fiction, whatever the genre I always seem to have a book near me. Reading connects us to imagined worlds but also to realities we want to be apart of. Reading taught me what it took to write for my desired audience. The books, news, and magazines piled on my desk are my textbooks. Every writer has something to teach us, and after all, we write to try and teach someone, right?