Don’t let me be like this all the time, self.
The first thing a writer must do is write. That is what a writer is. So, if we’re in this together and you haven’t gone and done that, go write. The second thing, though, we should have already been doing.
Read.
Read a lot.
Read as much as we can stand to read, plus a little bit more than that.
What should we read? Everyone’s got an opinion. Some say read the best of the best, and learn only from the classics that everyone has all read. Some say read everything, especially the occasional bad shit to learn what not to do. Really, though, just read. Read lit. Read pulp. Read comic books, magazines, and newspapers. Me, I read mostly what I want to write like, and read a whole bunch of other stuff besides.
Also, at least a book a week. I felt crazy when I thought about doing that, but then I started churning through two or three books a week that I liked, and easily knocking out a book a week with things I didn’t. I say aim for that, at least.
If you don’t have time, that’s not okay. If you didn’t have time to write, that would be okay: then you simply wouldn’t be a writer. But what kind of writer doesn’t read? Didn’t reading really well written things get us to this point? I never met a movie director who hated movies, or a painter who said looking at images was a waste of time. Besides, a writer has to reread what they’ve written over and over again; we need to get used to reading.
We should love reading, or at least enjoy it. Make the time. Borrow books if you can’t afford them. Get through a book a week, especially a novel a week. If it’s Moby Dick, fine, take two weeks. Three if you must.
I know I read a lot of cheap, pulpy junk. It’s fun and reads fast, and I can see the whole story arc through. I want to write like that, and some of it is on par, narratively, with things I had to read in college. When I hit something harder to read, from Yukikaze to The Decameron, it’s just as much fun. It makes me stop, think, savor the ideas washing in my brain. Even legit bad writing is invigorating. A reminder that maybe failure isn’t the only option for me.
That’s part of it too. Don’t simply read to get it done. Read to enjoy it. But also, we have to always be on the look out for when something grabs us, good or bad — something exciting, something so boring you can’t ignore it, something painful, something wonderous, something that makes you put the book down in fear — in order to think about it. Try to understand it. We need to wrap our brains around what just happened and learn from it.
Write and read. These are the only two unbreakable rules of being a writer, no matter what. Get used to it.
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