: Re: Can I be a good writer without reading a lot? This may seem like blasphemy to a lot of you, but can I become a good writer without doing incredible amounts of reading? I never read for

@Hamaas631

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I will somewhat disagree with the other answers by agreeing with "what" 's answer.

"Do you need to watch a lot of sports to be a good sportsman? "

In short, writing is about writing and reading is about reading.

One activity is doing the other is being, it is acting versus contemplating. From everything I read; :) one becomes a better writer by writing, not reading.

Ask this to the countless foreigners who read a lot, understand every movie, and yet who can’t really write, nor speak, fluently or correctly.
And yes, I do speak from experience, as i was one of them. Even now, inspite of having read thousands of book, having lived in the US for 10 years, and writing hundreds of pages, i still do struggle with words and have to wrestle with my writings. I also know a lot of native speakers who may be great readers, but who would stare at a blank page until it tarnished.

Yes, reading books will improve your vocabulary, yes it will expose you to plots and structure. Yet, that will not make you into a writer, it will make you into a READER, a critic who will spot problems with a story and its flow. Like the saying: "those who can’t do, teach"; here it can be used as "those who can’t write, read".
A writer is not only a composer but a word smith, a storyteller, a communicator. Yes, a writer can get better at sensing what works or not by reading more, but it doesn’t work the other way around and a reader does not a writer make.

That being said, I think your main problem might be about ideas or concepts. As you seem to have mainly been exposed to movies and video games, you may not realize how cliche they are. A seemingly hot, creative, original, exiting, daring, and novel movie concept has probably been over-used to death in fiction. Sorry to break it to you, but video game's developers and movie's screenwriters are the laziest conceptual creators i know of and the ones that are not do seem to considerably dumb down their ideas to fitto the level of a brain damaged general audiance. So, even if most concepts, in Sci-Fi/Fantasy for instance, are re-hashed the genre readers expect an exponentially better story than what you may be used to. On the other hand, not knowing what was done before can be liberating creatively, and after all some of the greatest stories are not original at all.

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