Writing is magic. All this week, we’ve been talking about what it takes to build a writing life that feels magical—we started with mindset, and yesterday we talked about practice.
The third element of your writing life is craft. It’s no coincidence that the act of writing, much like working magic, is referred to that way.
Wordcraft is every bit as powerful as witchcraft, and in either case we have a responsibility to hone our skills and use our powers wisely. And writing is a learnable skill, which is the message I hope to impart today.
Let’s dispense with the “talent” issue immediately. Do some people have a natural facility with language and storytelling? Yeah, sure, neat, good for them. The thing is: who cares? Someone can have all the talent in the world, and it’s not going to matter if they don’t work at developing it.
Someone who wants to write and who is willing to put in the work to improve their craft is equally likely—and perhaps even more likely—to reach their writing goals. Relying on talent will only get you so far.
Devoting yourself to your craft, on the other hand? That’s a powerful act of magic.
When you feel stuck in your writing, it's easy to think it's solely a craft issue. Impostor syndrome and self-doubt can sneak in and corrode your connection with your intuition about the stories you're here to tell.
Procrastinating by reading "just one more craft book" or signing up for another workshop? Very easy to do.
The goal here is not to get stuck in an eternal doom loop of craft-related worry.
It's to commit yourself to your craft and then release the results (as in, a literal release in the form of a finished book—but also letting go of the panicky need to feel in control that can keep you from writing it in the first place).
Being devoted to your craft isn't about constantly fretting that you aren't good enough yet. It's about deepening your storytelling intuition, falling further in love with language, and getting back to the page again and again.
How you actually go about growing your writing skills will look different from writer to writer, project to project, and genre to genre. I love working with writers in Get Unstuck Sessions and my three-month coaching program to identify what gap they see in their writing and finding ways to build a bridge over it.
Instead of providing an exhaustive list of writing tips or book recommendations (there’s plenty of that out there already), I want to talk about one piece of craft advice that gets bandied about a lot but is rarely explained in a satisfactory way.
We're going to talk about reading.
We hear all the time that one of the most important things you can do as a writer is to read a lot.
Common sense, right? But what does it actually mean?
Because, listen, I do read a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I’m generally reading a rotating cast of three to five books, a practice that confuses my one-book-at-a-time husband to no end. But not all of that reading is for my writing.
The advice to read a lot is a good start, but it’s not the whole picture. You do need to read as much as possible, sure, but you need to read like a writer. That’s a very different act than reading for pleasure.
Reading for pleasure is wonderful, obviously, and it has many benefits. It can be enjoyable, relaxing, transporting, challenging, mind-expanding, and life-altering. But it is not, in and of itself, going to make you a better writer.
Reading like a writer engages your brain in a different way entirely. It’s focused, inquisitive, and goal-oriented. It’s intentional. The task of this reading is to help you work on your craft, not to be a pleasant interlude in your day (although it can certainly be that, as well).
Reading like a writer can look like enjoying a beautiful sentence, and then pausing to break it down and figure out what makes it tick.
One of my coaching clients is great at this. She keeps a note on her phone with a running list of quotations from books she’s reading—lines that made her stop in her tracks, contained a beautiful metaphor, or evoked a strong emotion.
That list helps her identify what she admires about other writers and hopes to emulate in her writing. It provides her with clear models, snippets of writing she can use as a basis of comparison when she’s working on her book.
That is reading like a writer.
Someone who picks up a book from The Best American Series just to read the short stories or essays will likely have a great time (especially this year—just look at that editor list! Celeste Ng, Jia Tolentino, Nnedi Okorafor, Susan Orlean… my wallet is in trouble).
Someone who wants to write short stories or essays and picks up a book from the collection will have a great time as well. But they can also use the book as a springboard for learning: What types of short stories and essays are getting published? Where? What patterns are common across this collection? Whose voices are missing?
That is reading like a writer.
I’m currently salivating all over Pam Grossman’s newest book, Magic Maker, underlining passages and dogearing pages that I want to return to for research and inspiration (affiliate link*).
I’m enjoying the heck out of it and reading it as someone who’s writing a book about creative practices: How does Grossman discuss the intersections between magic and creativity? Where do our projects overlap and diverge? What defines her voice? How should I think about my book in relation to hers and others like it?
That is reading like a writer.
When I was at the SAGA Conference last year (a great event for genre authors, by the way!), I attended a panel session that has stuck with me. Matt Dinniman, author of the phenomenal LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl series, talked about something he does to improve his writing (affiliate link*).
He reads the latest, greatest, and most positively-reviewed works in his genre, as many writers do. But he also seeks out and reads books that get absolutely brutal reviews. Reading the “best” and “worst” books he can find shows him what readers in his genre like, dislike, and expect. He then incorporates that information into his writing.
That is reading like a writer.
Simply telling writers to "read a lot" misses the point, because it’s not really about volume. Reading many books is certainly helpful, but reading with intention and a focus on improving your craft as a direct result of that reading is far more powerful.
This is especially true if you're feeling stuck. Sometimes, reading the type of book you want to write can feel real bad when you're in a rut! It can seem like a reminder of the work you want to do and haven't yet managed to figure out.
But if you approach those books to read like a writer, they can become the handholds you use to climb back out of the rut. They can be signposts on your way to telling your story, too.
Teaching yourself to read like a writer is a crucial part of becoming a writing alchemist and building your personal gnosis, that knowledge bank of what works for you and what you hope to accomplish in your books.
Reading narrowly—i.e., focusing your attention on the genre and types of books you hope to write—is a good practice. If you want to write space operas, I’d expect that you regularly read recently published and classic space operas. If you want to write a business book, you’d better have a selection of business books on your shelf.
Reading widely—i.e., broadening your scope into other genres and types of books—is also a good practice. Reading poetry might inspire you to play with imagery and white space. Seeing how a journalist interviews sources could help you write better dialogue.
When the goal is to improve your craft, intention is everything. Above, I mentioned that I’m typically reading a whole mess of books at any one time. My husband always wonders how it is that I don’t get confused from book to book.
It’s actually pretty easy, because each book serves a different need and I’m reading it with a different intention.
The book I read before bed tends to be familiar, comforting, and undemanding. For pleasure reading, I’m generally reading a novel and a nonfiction book about some topic I’m interested in. And then I have “read like a writer/business owner” books to improve my craft or do a better job coaching writers and running The Writing Desk.
I share all that not to say you should read the way I do, but to point out that books can meet very different needs and that we, as writers, can—and must—approach them in very different ways.
Whether you’re an all-the-books-all-the-time reader, a one-book-at-a-time reader, or somewhere in between, that’s awesome! Be intentional about what books you choose and how you read them.
Intention is a huge part of any magical practice, and that includes the magic of storytelling and writing.
The clearer you get on your intention when you pick up a book, a magic wand, or a pen, the more powerful your results are going to be.
So, tell me: What’s on your TBR? How do you plan on reading it?