Can You Be a Writer if You Don’t Read 100 Books Per Year?
Reading matters, but there are diminishing returns.
I have a confession to make: I don’t read 100 books every year. Does that mean Running Wild Press should pull my book from circulation, or that Kirkus should take down their review? According to a tweet that went viral a while back, no one who reads fewer than 100 books per year can be a writer, so I guess that means I’m not a writer and my book shouldn’t exist.
Except I am, and it does. So what does it mean?
Reading does matter for writers. How can you know what good writing is if you never crack a book? It was while reading Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand that I realized that “show don’t tell” is nuanced; du Maurier’s story about a man who time travels as a result of taking a psychedelic made me realize that a well-crafted story needs a balance between showing and telling. It was a breakthrough moment for me.
With that in mind, it’s hard to argue that you can be a good writer if you don’t read at all. But are the people who brag about how much they read right about the essentialness of their high numbers?
In a blog post outlining the downsides of writing groups, Jennie Nash writes, “Many writers think they understand story and narrative because they love to read, and they are great readers, and they recognize a great story when it’s on the page. But that is very different from knowing how a dramatic narrative (for fiction) or a narrative argument (for nonfiction) is constructed, or knowing how to get the emotion on the page, or knowing how to hold the readers’ expectation in your mind as you write. These are very different skills.” (Emphasis mine.)
“But what about musicians?”
Whenever this topic comes up, somebody inevitably brings up musicians. “Don’t musicians have to listen to a lot of music?” they ask.
Why don’t we ask the musicians themselves? I just finished reading If it Swings, it’s Music, an autobiography of Gabe Baltazar, a legendary Hawaiian-born jazz musician who toured with Stan Kenton in the 1960s. In the book, Baltazar recalls the hours he spent practicing, the various instruments he learned, the musicians he played with, the venues where he played, and the recordings he played on, but at no point does he count the number of albums he listened to.
For another example, let’s look at the Beatles. The Fab Four had a wide range of influences, from Big Bill Broonzy to Elvis. But, it was the hours on stage that made them stars. From 1960 to 1962, the Beatles played between 1,000 and 2,000 hours over 250 nights at various nightclubs in Hamburg, Germany. During this time, they marshaled their creativity to engineer an exciting stage show and develop a unique style that helped them stand out from the crowd when they took it back with them to England. As biographer Mark Lewisohn puts it, “No Hamburg, no Beatles.”
As Lewisohn’s simple equation makes plain, we wouldn’t even be talking about the Beatles today if all they had were a stack of other people’s albums.
Aim for diversity, not quantity
Most of us don’t have time to read piles of books every year. We have jobs. We have chores. We zone out in front of the TV because we’re exhausted from jobs and chores. It’s all too easy to put reading on the back burner.
So what do you do if you want to read but don’t feel like you can reach some magic number? Well, first, you can forget about magic numbers. 10,000 steps a day was never based on real science and neither is 100 books per year. Second, try reading different things rather than a lot of things. If you normally read serious history books, throw in the occasional celebrity memoir. If you read mostly literary fiction, choose not to turn up your nose at genre fiction. You might learn more about how to move a plot forward from horror, romance, or mystery novels than you do from certain critical darlings. If you never read poetry, read some! Read plays now and again too.
If you are someone who reaches that century mark every year, I congratulate you. You’re an amazing reader. I can’t say it makes you a great writer, however. After all, millions of people consume hours and hours of television every year. Very few of them would make great showrunners. Somebody who has watched every episode of Duck Dynasty is not likely to create the next Mad Men.