by Claude Morales

Created on: April 15, 2010

I was immediately captivated by the title and wanted to put forward my own black and white vision. Reading other articles about it  took me to some thinking about my own status as a writer in English, being of a different nationality, the latter increasing actually the problem at my level.

I would first say it is not certain that a writer likes reading. You can probably write and do not like reading too much for different reasons. There are, for examples, movie actors who make films but do not go into cinemas or even review their films. 

This said, the question is whether reading can make a better writer.

 I think so for the following reasons:

 - I do not attempt to distinguish genres in a way that I would only read the right genre, assuming I can nominate it and reject the bad genre.

- There is in each text, in each section, in each novel, a heart, that is to say an argument that remains the key. If you read a text on U.S. policy in Asia you will not find anything about the conquest of Mars.

- There really is a heart that is the argument and we can be for or against, needless to say, in which case we will carry on with our reading if this is the book we were looking for or reject that book and put it back on the shelf.

- All around, there is the circle of development of the main idea in which the author takes us through a simple or complex vocabulary to understand what the heart is about. So, when you read Marcel Proust and his endless sentences, these are the path to guide you to the heart. 

This said, I read everything to enrich my vocabulary trying to understand what the path is. I am not too much concerned about the heart of the book. So I can read a magazine, a novel, a serious newspaper or anything at a certain speed so as to enrich my mind.

Reading a dictionary to understand a word does not seem enough. Only reading can bring to you new words as an additional vocabulary in total disorder but these are living in a certain context that helps you build your mind as a writer, especially when you write in a language that is not your native language.

Reading helps you understand the language, build your own journey through words and reach the essence of writing  that is a fluidity of expression.

And I think yes, reading helps to improve the style, the fluidity of language, the complexity of the sentence structure. It is like discovering how you build a cathedral or a cottage because you are working as a brick-layer and such discoveries could help you in your current job..

As a statement that reading can help a writer to become better, I would add that this is ( to me at least) a technical contribution that I am searching through reading and not to recopy a style.

Fast reading can help too and I also feel that it is a mandatory condition to improve your writing. The faster you read the faster your brain will work and the better your ideas will develop to take their shapes on paper.

Reading can actually be compared to refuelling, the extra food that you need (even though you feel you are good enough not to spend your time on reading,  for when you read you cannot write), opening up your minds to all sorts of new experiences and building in your inner part this mechanism called writing. 

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