alt Hacker News> Why be a writer if you don’t love reading? Why devote your intellectual and emotional energy to creating a book, when it’s a form you’re not invested in? Why write, when you aren’t steeped in wonder of storytelling?
This is the key point, I think. I've seen the same as the author: people who want to be writers but rarely read books. And I don't get it.
I recently finished a novel (now shopping around for agents, which was hard enough pre-AI but now...) and reading was integral to writing it. I know good sentences. I know the style of prose I like to read. I know how things can veer between florid and poetic and where the line is. I know how a sentence can be completely different if you read it as though it was spoken, instead of to yourself (some of mine are written to be read.)
I know the things that annoy me: dropping out to put thoughts in italics; descriptions that specify instead of evoke; characters talking without it leading somewhere. (And much more.)
How do I know this? From reading.
And I want to tell the story. It was a story that grew, that I think will anger the right people (it's not too kind to Musk or VCs or the Russian Orthodox Church), and yet is simply an adventure, tumbling our characters from situation to situation like they fell overboard while navigating rapids. Ultimately I wrote a book I wanted to read. It turned out to be about post-apocalyptic startups and sea monsters.
Someday I'll publish, I hope. And no doubt someone will read it and find style they dislike, learn from it things they don't want to do in their writing, either. But I also hope that there are moments in the book that will inspire someone else, in that they too will want to write, based on what they read.
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As the old quip goes: people don’t want to be writers, they want to have published a book.
You can turn this around as well: people don’t want to read, they want to be well read.
The difference is “effort and process” versus a status. People want the label, but don’t want to do the work to get there.
I also completely agree with this part. However, writing is its own muscle that needs to be trained and sometimes reading more can also be procrastinating in disguise. What helped me a lot has been: Read a lot because you love it Force yourself to write everyday, even if it’s for 5 minutes or you might postpone it forever
I was quite fortunate to have an AP English teacher my senior year of high school that understood this advice, and expounded on it often. I recall that he boiled it down to one simple line:
Garbage in, garbage out.
What he meant by that was that it's not enough to simply read. You have to read high quality literature if you want to become a writer. 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. It's like trying to get physically healthy by eating junk food.
I think because these people don’t see writing as a process, they see the finished product…either they don’t understand that writing isn’t just an action, it’s a synthesis that requires raw materials. Or maybe they don’t understand that experience isn’t sufficient raw material. You need experience and skill to create a story that sounds good and resonates.
I love reading so much I can’t imagine not loving it, but when it’s made to be hard when you learn or it’s presented as a chore it’s harder to develop that love. Teaching kids and other adults to love reading by reading to them and reading yourself is something every reading adult can do!
> people who want to be writers but rarely read books. And I don't get it.
Some of the best books are not from writers, but people who have something to say and writing happens to be a medium.
Since we are on HN, the analogy that comes to my mind is becoming a founder in an area you have no expertise or even sincere interest in. Not a rare phenomenon at all.
I'm not someone who typically reads books, so I have some perspective. Although I'm not the type of person who would fool myself into actually exploring the medium of writing.
Everyone likes stories in some form. Everything has a story and it's natural for the brain to invent new stories. Some stories are addictive - brain worms - you just need to explore the story you developed. Writing is the cheapest medium to explore it.
I'm certain if I wrote a book no one would want to read it - but maybe it's still a good story.
> This is the key point, I think. I've seen the same as the author: people who want to be writers but rarely read books. And I don't get it.
Because the idea of being a writer is more appealing that the action of writing
> I don't get it
Is it hard to understand that for some people it may be difficult to read ? It might be due to motivation issues, thrust issues, or concentration issues. While at the same time they may have a rich inner imagination or thinking that they would like to share.
My impression is that humanity might miss valuable insight by rejecting whatever is not "well written" whatever the reason might be.
You may feel yourself very luck if you don't have any difficulties to read and write. Avoid to judge severely people who don't share the same facilities.
You could always post it on a web-serial site like: https://www.royalroad.com
I have seen that to be a viable path to publishing many times now, as well as other benefits like building a community of readers.
One tip: I suggest that you stop cluttering your writing with parentheticals.
If it's worth saying at all then it's likely not actually a parenthetical. If it's not worth saying, then you should cull it. Yours seem to mostly fall in this latter category, in my assessment anyway
Decide what you are trying to communicate and be sure that every word is in service to that message and that message alone. For example, you are discussing the practice of writing. That's why I'm in this thread, as a reader. In the middle of a sentence about finishing your novel, you mention via parenthetical that you're looking for an agent. Maybe the intent here was self-promotion -- you hope an agent or someone who knows one will read this -- fine. But if you can't decide and plan to use a parenthetical instead, know that the reader will be paying a dear cost: the sentence containing the parenthetical will be substantially more painful to read. Subsequent uses will be worse.
By that second paragraph, you blew your parenthetical budget, and yet you went on to deploy three more. Parentheticals need to be vanishingly rare as they are an eyesore. Yes, if you'd like to die on that particular hill, you can use them with stylistic intent. Go for it. But for the reader it will probably grate.
It's the same thing with Ted Talks, it has become a vanity metric.
Please please suggest me some books where language and style of speaking sentences takes the crown rather than the story being the selling point.
I'm tired of hearing about the usual greats and also booker prize ones because they have good characters and good story content or shocking emotionally but are quite bland on the language front because they assume their readers have grade 5 level capacity so the sentences are simple, the vocab is basic. Thank you vintage dave
I agree with what you’re saying, but the original statement was “why be a writer when you don’t love reading?”, to which I can give many arguments.
But if it’s specifically about fiction novels, then sure, I agree.
All books are written, not all writing is for books.
> And I don't get it.
Money, audience, attention, building a community around your ideas, pushing agenda, there are thousands of reasons why someone can like to do X without doing Y. And the one that trumps them all: they just feel like it.
I read a little. I suppose my own excuse for not reading more is that I am too often disappointed in the stuff I have read—been recommended to read.
I would however like to write a thing that I would like to read. (If that makes sense.)
I suppose we'll see then if that makes me a shitty writer. (Probably. But that could also be from having not written anything of significant length ever before in my life.)
I’m working on a whitepaper on a layover.
> I know good sentences. I know the style of prose I like to read. I know how things can veer between florid and poetic and where the line is. I know how a sentence can be completely different if you read it as though it was spoken, instead of to yourself (some of mine are written to be read.)
Your perspective doesn’t really speak to me at all — because I’m writing as the way to explore and articulate ideas, while I’d get rid of the words as an unnecessary mess if I could. (And do when I can: diagrams, math, etc.)
I hope you publish, and I hope you tell that story. And I hope people read it.
There's a sobering article recently published in The Atlantic[1][2] about the end of reading and how we're in a postliterate age. We're reading more words than ever, but instead of coming from books, they're coming from digital media. We're losing that same muscle for long-form reading and deep focus that the original author talks about being so critical for writing. I think it's the same muscle that lets us think. Quoting from The Atlantic:
> What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities.
Accelerated now by generative AI, I fear that the end of reading goes hand-in-hand with the end of writing. I've totally sworn of AI for reading and writing. Maybe that makes me a Luddite, but I don't want to lose those muscles and I don't want the world to become a place where humans no longer read or write or think.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
[2]: https://archive.ph/Rpquh