Read until you can write

This may be a bit obvious, but I was discussing this with Ryan (hey my only follower!) and it is something I have considered for a while...

To be a good writer you must be a good reader.

Duh, we all knew that. Well for my later teenage years (while I was at high school) I read very little. In fact, the only books I read were ones prescribed by my school and even then I hardly finished them. I was too busy playing computer games, doing homework and trying to find a girlfriend to be bothered reading. In retrospect I now understand why I wrote so much in my early teens and have been writing so much after my first year of uni, but almost nothing in between; I didn't read.

First and foremost, being a creative person, any sort of stimulus sets my creative juices flowing. Going to a music festival makes me pick up my guitar and write songs again, seeing a great drawing has me reaching for my pencils. That is the nature of creativity. It sounds kind of dumb, but I look at the creation of art in that the artist is a conduit through which an idea gains material presence. The artist allows ideas to flow from the ethereal nothingness through his fingers, hands or voice. Now when this idea was offered to me I rejected it, but having come to understand its hypothetical validity I can see the great importance of being open to these ideas swimming around in your subconscious. This is where I get back to reading. Reading something that you find engaging or incredible (or even something you don't like) will create an array of new ideas which may just manifest themselves in your subconscious and then suddenly while your on the train or going to bed or sitting on the toilet you suddenly have an idea. It's like planting a field of seeds and then having some of them appear on your plate. This may sound like interminable wank* but it gives a perspective on the importance of creative stimulus.
*because it is

Another, more tangible importance for reading is that the more you read the more you gain an understanding of the structure of a narrative and the use of language and what a reader is expecting of a writer. There is a difference between the speedy consumption of a book as my brother reads, without any critical engagement, and the close examining given by an editor or an academic, but I would recommend reading in the fruitful middle ground. You must read for pleasure and to be immersed in the story, but it is important to maintain a critical lens to understand what you think works and what doesn't work, and why that is. Avoid just saying "I don't like it" or "I love it" because they are useless assessments. there are reasons you like things and you must identify those in order to replicate them.

Circling back to my own writing, I started trying to write again about a year and a half ago and found all of my ideas stale and lacking. Then I started reading, did a unit on fiction writing and suddenly my interests piqued again. By June last year I had written a short story and received a really good mark and read many books, even including 'Great Expectations' despite my distaste towards Dickens. As soon as my exams finished (as in the night after my final exam) I began planning a story which would eventually become 'Stone of the Devourer.' I began writing at the start of July and by the time I was back at uni I was almost 30,000 words in - closing in on the most words I had ever written on a single project. That semester we, as a class of 17, wrote a musical to be performed at the end of semester and I was introduced to an entirely new style of narrative creation and understanding. By the end of semester I had reached 50,000 words and was buzzing to get cracking. By the end of the year I had passed 100,000 and I had finished my novel a month later. This speed with which I planned and wrote my story was a direct relation to the inspiration I had by simply reading and reading widely.

If you don't read you won't be able to write, at least nowhere near the quality you'd like. Most of the truly successful writers have university educations or at least read a truckload of books. But I'm sure you love reading, otherwise you wouldn't have waded through this whole post.

TL:DR; Reading is good.