To become a better writer, read as much as you can

The gist

• Novelist T. R. Napper argues there is no blueprint for writing except one golden rule: "Read as much as you can. Read widely and well."
• He says aspiring writers in his workshops increasingly answer that they are too busy to read, and counters by pointing at daily phone screen time: "Two hours? Five? Seven? If so - shut up: you've time to read."
• Napper reads 52 books a year, says friends read over a hundred, and calls 20 books a year the bare minimum.
• He credits reading outside his genre for his best science fiction ideas, citing hardboiled crime for understanding cyberpunk's origins and poetry for economy of image and mood.
• He cites Maryanne Wolf's "Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World" on how the distracted digital brain is anathema to the reading brain, which he says is also the writing brain.
• On generative AI he writes that it lets people who dislike reading generate a book: "They don't actually like art, they just like the idea of making art."

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