If You're a Writer, Why Aren't You Reading?

Read.

This is something I cannot emphasize enough that you as a writer need to be doing. Everybody gets their inspiration from somewhere. If you're not reading, if you're not watching shows, if you're not listening to radio, then you're cutting yourself off from your inspiration. If you don't have some sort of input into your life, you don't have any inspiration that's going to spark some really great idea. 

 Straight up: If you have something really good going on, and you can figure out how to pull it off, great, go for it, keep on doing it. But for the rest of us, we need a constant influx of ideas. We need to read magazines, we need to read stories, we need to read comics. It doesn't matter what we're actually reading as long as we have some sort of influx of actual ideas.

I know there's the counter-argument, that you're going to steal ideas unconsciously still. But here's the deal: You need to get over it. You need to see what others are doing, how they have solved (or failed to solve) problems that they've encountered while writing, and generally find inspiration. It doesn't matter if you see something so cool you want to try it yourself or something so bad that you want to see if you can do it better, or even something you're curious what your twist would like; you can't be inspired if you have no inspiration.  

I can understand trying to avoid plagiarism. That's fine. But you need to be aware that you need a spark from somewhere just to get going. But if you're so scared of other people's ideas, just by simply reading about them, well, how do you expect to be a better writer if you aren't looking at how other writers write? 

You're going to find out real quick that there's basically two facts out there. One: Everybody steals from everyone else at some point. I don't care if you're Shakespeare, I don't care if you're Dickens. I don't care if you're Toni Morrison. The bottom line is people are going to steal ideas from other people and there's nothing morally or legally bankrupt; it's perfectly fine. 

Two: You can't steal an idea. As long as you don't merely copy it, you should be fine. 

This means that you can do is take somebody else's idea. mess around with it, put your own spin on it, and have some fun with it. Cuz again, that happens all the time. Take advantage of it. Have a little bit of fun with it. Make sure that you have some sort of influx of inspiration to keep you going. But remember one thing: If you're not reading, you're not writing. 

So get out there and read!