I heard about a little Twitter dust-up from Nathan Bransford’s blog: One of the Fastest Paths to Rejection: Implying You Don’t Read Much.
There isn’t much that I can add other than, Are you kidding me? I know the urge on Twitter is to rev up those couple of hundred characters and voice an opinion, but in this case that opinion is flawed. Writing is reading. You can’t do one without the other. Don’t agree, fine. Leave a comment.
Seriously though, I know I wouldn’t eat from a chef who’s never tasted food. How about going to a doctor who’s never been sick? Things just don’t work that way. The few times I’ve addressed a group of authors I started with asking who is in the middle of a book. Sadly I don’t always see many hands raised.
Writing is more than just coming up with stories. It is a love affair with the written word, and the only way to interact with that word is to have read it. So, let this be a lesson, any author who want’s to be taken seriously needs to be a reader. Any author who doesn’t want to be laughed at needs to never admit it if they aren’t.
Vincent A. Alascia 