Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Pretty much every author I have heard speak on the subject says that to be a writer you should read as much as possible; in whatever genre or field you wish to write, so you'll know what is expected in it, and in other genres and fields to understand the relative hows and whys.
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Lawrence Block doesn't. Well, he does suggest that the aspiring novelist picks up half a dozen novels in the genre she wants to write in, then reads them twice (like a writer, not like a reader), then analyzes them to get a feeling for the structure beneath the words, but he doesn't believe it is strictly required. In his opinion, you can write in any genre that you can stomach reading without cringing.
He started his career in the fifties when he wrote lesbian erotica without ever having read much in the field (chiefly because it didn't really exist before as a genre) when the job opportunity came along.
I actually recommend his books on writing. Quite entertaining and insightful, and he's one of the very few authors of such books who have actually published a large number of commercial novels. There are so many authors of "how to write a novel" books that have never published anything else.
As for the question whether reading improves writing, well, yes, of course it does. The brain is a "what goes in, comes out" kind of device. I often discover brilliant ways of expressing ideas or concepts in short stories and novels, new words and phrases, or just elegant and innovative approaches.
English isn't my native language, either, though I am not sure that it matters as much as it may seem at first glance: if you are a decent writer in one language, you should do decently in the second or third language, too, at least once you have assembled enough building blocks (vocabulary, idioms, etc.), which you do by reading. Reading is like scavenging in that regard.
I believe that the brain is (or may be) language-independent in the sense that it stores information as "objects", and that words are only labels that refer to these "objects". Learning a second language "only" adds a second set of labels, and in time it will be mostly just the same. That happens when you start thinking in the "foreign" language (context-sensitive) and no longer mentally translate. For me, this occurred after a few years of intensive exposure to English. (But since I learned English mostly as an adult, and in written form before I could actually speak it, my grammar is frequently still a little German in nature.)
But it is entirely possible that I am totally off.