: Re: How do I become a better writer when I hate reading? I like telling stories, but I don't care so much for reading them. It's not for me. But the number one advice to become a better author

@Goswami879

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But the number one advice to become a better author is to read a lot.

This is because reading is the only way to be exposed to the variety of different styles and forms available to you. It'll be pretty hard to hone your craft when you can't see how other people are fixing issues in their work.

If you hate reading a particular type of story, like fantasy, or scifi, or YA, or romance, you can always leave that out of your reading list. I hope this is the case just because it's going to be very very difficult to improve if you genuinely dislike reading. I know a lot of writers - all of them enjoy reading something.

A digression - one person I knew really only liked reading nonfiction articles. The story they wrote blew me away, mainly because it read so much like nonfiction that it was hard to remember that it wasn't real.

But anyway - let's assume you will not be doing any reading, sans rereading your own work, obviously. You'll need a lot of other readers who can point out areas of your writing that seem immature. The reason that writers need to read is because it gives them something to compare their own work against, or something to imitate.

Hopefully, your beta readers will give you useful feedback - "character A is too flat", "scene X moves too slow". You can focus on fixing those issues by figuring out what makes other characters (your own or fictional) well rounded, what makes the pacing of other scenes good.

Obviously, keep practicing your writing. Maybe you can try to achieve a certain effect, or imitate a style from a different medium of storytelling.

I personally like oscillating between styles based on what I'm reading. You could try writing in different tenses and POVs to stretch your writing muscles, but this is just a writing exercise.

Basically, keep writing, and go back to see why that writing needs to be better. Practice is key, whether you read or not. If the books I've read haven't influenced my writing process or style at all, then they haven't helped me get better.

What you need is some way of 'evaluating' your work. Whether that's against other stories or people's opinion is your decision. It's going to be hard for you to judge your own work because you won't have seen a lot of ways it could've been done better.

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