Yes, obviously. But maybe not in the way some people think? This is a weird question that comes up every so often in The Discourse, and it inevitably reveals more about emotional states than it does the craft of writing. It’s worth investigating what people actually mean when they ask this question, what role reading actually plays in writing, and why Interview With The Vampire is a fantastic adaptation.

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren:  Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: So, I have a book that I want you to buy and read, but I will never buy and read your book. I actually hate your book. I think it’s worthless. I hate the whole concept of your book. No, please buy my book. 

Chris: Oh, no. 

Oren: This opening bit is actually also setting context for an important part of our topic today, which is the question of: Do writers need to read question mark?

Chris: Is there really a question mark? Is there a really a−

Oren: I mean−

Chris: −question?

Oren: −sometimes. 

Chris: Is this really any question? 

Oren: I mean it’s a weird bit of perennial discourse that pops up every once in a while, and it’s like, I think it is 90% motivated by fear, in my experience.

Chris: Definitely feels like rage bait discourse. 

Oren: Yeah. I have no idea how many people there are out there that seriously think that they can write a novel without ever having read a novel. Every once in a while you see someone who claims that, and I’m like, are you a real person? Who knows? I’ve certainly never met one of these people in real life. But at the same time, writers are scared that these people exist. And it’s for the reason I just described. At least, in my opinion it is. I’m doing a little bit of armchair psycho-analysis here, right? 

You know, we’re all scared−for a bunch of reasons−but in this most immediate reason is that we all see the news articles about how reading rates are falling and who’s gonna buy and read our books if no one is buying or reading books? And then you’ve got these maybe real people who want to sell us their books, but refuse to read ours in return. And it’s, uh, it makes us very mad.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, even without the falling reading rates, it’s just so competitive. And we want people to buy more books so that more of us can have careers, or there could be kind of an implied insult to the medium itself. Like, well, if you’re not reading, it feels like the easy conclusion to take from that is that, well, you don’t enjoy reading. It’s not a fun pastime for you. So, if you don’t like this art medium, why are you creating stories in it, for instance? So, again, that can be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but that is certainly how… I think, why it enrages people so much. I mean, that combined with just the fact that people really want to complain about new books and how they’re worse than yesterday’s books. 

Oren: Yeah, they do like to do that.

Chris: I honestly think it’s the reverse. Over a long enough time span, I think books are getting better, not worse. It doesn’t mean that this year’s books are that much better than last year’s books.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But yeah, it’s just always very popular to complain about the books these days. Just like we complain about the kids these days. 

Oren: Right, and if anyone has been able to find a well-known book by an author who never reads, I don’t know of that. I don’t think that’s a thing. 

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a thing either, but it certainly plays into the fear. It’s that like, oh, all of the books are now bad because writers don’t read anymore. 

Oren: Right. And of course this combines with the young people panic, right? Every once in a while there’s a viral story where some professor will be like, the people in my class don’t know how to read books anymore. And it’s one of those things where on the one hand “kids these days”, this is a perennial complaint. Everyone always complains about kids these days. But I don’t want to entirely dismiss it because the education system is worse funded now than it used to be. 

Chris: It’s worse funded. Yeah. 

Oren: And of course there is the brand new, very fun variable of LLMs being everywhere, and we don’t really know exactly how that’s going to affect people. There are some preliminary reports that are pretty scary, but it’s still only, it’s still actually fairly new, and it’s hard to separate the real data from the panic pieces.

Chris: Yeah, it is. The idea that kids aren’t, for instance, not just not writing their own papers, but they don’t have to read books anymore because they’re just summarizing them, you know, it’s scary. I don’t know how much that’s common, right, but it’s−

Oren: −and to be clear, that happened before LLMs.

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Right? 

Chris: Yeah, no, all the CliffsNotes. We were always doing that. I mean, I didn’t personally do that, but I assume lots of other people did. People who−

Oren: −yeah, I mean, I’m−

Chris: −were more reasonable with their time− 

Oren: −I’m not− 

Chris: −sometimes.

Oren: −I’m not gonna say that I never did that. 

Chris: When I look back, at the time when I read through all of Atlas Shrugged, I was like, why didn’t I do that? Why did I make myself read over a thousand pages of Ayn Rand?

Oren: Right. So, but anyway, this all ties into the anxiety that people have about this supposed cohort of authors that don’t want to read books, and as a result, people are primed to jump at some random account with 15 followers that claims you don’t have to read books and may or may not be a real person. But at the other hand, at the other end of it, I’ve noticed another defensive reaction, which is from people who don’t just not read but maybe don’t read as much as they feel like they should read. And they feel judged by this whole thing. You know, like people who have read a lot but maybe don’t read much or at all anymore for whatever reason. That’s a pretty common narrative. You talk to people who are like, yeah, when I was in high school I read like a book a week, and now I just can’t get myself to do it.

 And these people then feel judged, and they get upset, and then it just becomes a round and round and round endless cycle, and it gets… at that point, it’s less about the initial question of do writers need to read and more about how cool of a nerd you are in one way or another. 

Chris: I do think that if you’re one of those people who feels a little insecure about how much you read because you don’t read as much as you would like to be reading, personally, I don’t think that’s the person that everybody else is panicking over.

Realistically, I think that when people get this negative reaction to the idea of writers not reading, they’re imagining a very stereotypical person who just hates books, or is, you know, at all… right, and doesn’t think that they need to put any work in and or whatever. They’re not thinking about the person who actually does like books and has read many books that they loved, but is doing a million things and raising kids, and taking care of their aging parents at the same time or whatever it is that you’re doing. Right? And is having trouble squirreling away the time to read. I don’t think−, that’s not the type of person that people are thinking of.

Oren: Right. There is a specific breed of writing advice giver whose first advice to any question is always go read lots of books.

Chris: Because they’re bad at their jobs. 

Oren: It’s not good advice, right? Like yeah, reading… it can give you some help, right? It can be useful for your craft, but this idea that like more books equals more better writing, it’s not true.

Chris: If somebody gives that advice on top of also giving lots of good craft advice, okay, fine. But like−

Oren: Sure.

Chris: −I definitely feel like there is some, oh, you know it when you see it. I don’t want to have to personally do the work to figure out what that means or what the rules are to teach it to somebody else, so just read and you’ll just know it when you see it, too, if you read enough, right? 

Oren: Yeah. There’s this attitude that if you read a lot of books, you can kind of absorb the skills through osmosis. 

Chris: And it’s not impossible to do that, but it’s certainly not reliable, and it’s definitely slower than actually sitting down to really learn.

Oren: Right, because if you do want to learn from books, you have to be able to read critically, and that’s a kind of confusing term for some people because some people what they think that means is you should read a book and just trash everything in it. And don’t get me wrong, trashing will be involved, but you have to be able to do more than just find problems. You have to be able to look at the reasons why things are happening. And often this means looking past not only your own positive reactions, but also your own negative reactions.

 Like, you didn’t like something−, this is something that I have to deal with, for example, when I’m reading a dark story, because I don’t tend to like dark stories very much, and so it’s easy for me to assume, “Ugh, I hate this character because they are a bad character and they’re terribly written.” It’s like, okay, is that really the reason or is the reason that I just didn’t like that they did dark things in a dark story? That sort of thing. Or, another big one is like, “Oh man, I hate this hindrance character so much. I wish that hindrance character was dead. This book would be so much better if that hindrance character was dead.” But is the issue really the character or is it that the author doesn’t want to move the plot forward and if that character wasn’t around, they would find some other reason? 

Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of things that storytellers do that get blamed on characters, but we also hear from a lot of people who, again, when they’re new to this and they’re still learning to do critical reading, it takes some long time to figure out, “Okay, I’m not into it. Why? I don’t like this. Why?” And that just basic pinning down−, first of all, recognizing what you feel, which right can be a big step. Again, a new storyteller generally does not know what tension feels like. You have to pay attention to that and pay attention to your own feelings and learn that, and then from there, try to figure out why you are reacting the way you do. And then from there, you can start to get sort of storytelling lessons as you read material, but a lot of that takes a lot of introspection. And sometimes if you can’t tell right away, it might take: I’ve read several novels and was able to compare this one to this one, and it didn’t bother me in this case, but it did bother me in this case, and I think here’s why.

That takes a lot of time and introspection, but it does help for sure. 

Oren: Yeah. And then there’s the more immediate benefits of keeping up with reading. Either, if it’s your own genre, then you know what people are doing in the genre. You have some idea, and that can help you decide which story ideas to pursue. I’m not suggesting you try to write to the market. I don’t think that’s viable for most people, but if you didn’t read modern fantasy these days, and by modern I mean fantasy written today, not fantasy set in a modern period, if you didn’t do that, you might think we were all still publishing Lord of the Rings clones, and that’s just not the case. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and you wouldn’t know that. So, you could end up being like, yeah, I’m going to write my own Lord of the Rings clone, and it’ll flop because everyone’s like, we’ve all read Lord of the Rings, man. Or maybe the genre is set for a resurgence, and there’s Lord of the Rings clones all over the place!

But if you don’t read in the genre at all, you won’t know any of that. You won’t be able to make an informed decision. 

Chris: Again, we don’t encounter this very often, and so we don’t−, it doesn’t usually need to be said, but generally you want to be a fan of the genre that you’re writing in.

Oren: Probably. 

Chris: That may seem obvious, but occasionally we run into somebody who has never read that genre before or is kind of like, oh, that genre’s so bad, I’m going to do it better; doesn’t really like it; doesn’t have an understanding, therefore, of what fans like about the genre, right? And that could be, like, if you read that subgenre and those types of stories and you don’t like them, then trying to mimic them is probably not a good idea. 

Oren: And I understand writing out of spite. I’ve done that more than a few times. But there’s still like, what is it about this genre that you do want to have in your story? It’s probably gotta be something, right? Otherwise, why this genre? Pick one you like better. And this is a very long way of saying that if you are able to read critically and do this kind of analysis, that’s more important than the number of books you read. You don’t have, there’s not like a, I gotta read 20 books in a year. There’s no point in measuring it like that.

Chris: Obviously, people like to brag about their Read pile sometimes, although I think sometimes writers like to talk more about their To Be Read pile and how hopelessly big it is. So, if there’s all these books that you intended to read and never do read, you’re at least in good company.

Oren: That’s a very sympathetic problem to talk about these days, and it also helps them justify why they haven’t read whatever book you recommended to them. It’s like, oh, I totally would, but my To Be Read pile… it’s so big! 

Chris: It’s so big, I can’t do it! 

Oren: One talking point that I hadn’t seen before but has come up more recently is this idea that you can tell someone doesn’t read books because they don’t have any internalizing, which I find very weird. 

Chris: I mean, I could see why somebody would make that assumption. That’s what it looks like. That’s why we call it film POV. 

Oren: Yeah, and you can imagine some… you’re like, oh, okay, well, they’ve never read a book, so they don’t know what an internal narration looks like, so it’s all described from the outside like a camera. But this is one of the reasons why it’s hard for me to remember that not everyone has the same experience we do because I read lots of client manuscripts and they are often like that, and it’s not because the author doesn’t read. Now, certainly someone who doesn’t read could make that mistake, but also a number of authors that I’ve worked with who are voracious readers have made that mistake.

Chris: It’s funny because I’m sure if somebody stares at text−, and again, I say stare at text because I personally consume a lot of books on audio because that’s how I fit them into my schedule, right? I listen to them while I’m cooking, for instance. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder for me to consume as many books as I do. But a lot of readers, if you are looking at text on a page, a lot of times you would assume that people would know basic things, but everybody picks up some things and not other things, and so we get new clients that don’t know paragraph breaks. Just don’t know how to do them. Either they have almost no paragraph breaks or they just have too few, and so there’s huge chunks of text, for instance. 

Oren: Or, people who haven’t learned the basics of when to start a new paragraph around dialogue or around character actions, that sort of thing. 

Chris: That’s very common. Dialogue is pretty futzy. Another one I see is they don’t know how to integrate thoughts into the narration. There’s some of these things that writers, once you just get a little experience, you start to take for granted. But new people, they don’t know that. It’s not like when they’re reading a novel they’re staring at the text when somebody thinks and is like, okay, that’s how you do it. So, they just don’t pick up on a lot of those things. Naturally, they have to learn it. 

Oren: One thing that I find funny, which is that a thing that’s a weird bias that sneaks up on you if you are the kind of person who reads a billion books, is that you can develop your own bias where because you read so many books, you start to crave something weird and different in a way that the average reader doesn’t. And I found that can kind of color people’s perception of stories, and I just find that funny. It’s like, that’s a taste thing. That’s not inherently good or bad. It’s just weird when you see that leaking into someone’s review of a book where they’re like, this book is so cliche. It’s like every other book. I’m like, is it? They’re like, well, not really.

But I can see how if you have read 500 books in this genre, you just desperately want something different. 

Chris: And some genres have a lot of constraints that make it so that they have a lot of things in common, because that’s what you have to do with the constraints that it’s under. I feel like it’s very unfair, for instance, to accuse romance of being formulaic because it’s under a lot of constraints. With everything that’s going on, it’s actually quite complex, and that complexity means that it’s almost harder to do things that are different because it has to fit all of the constraints.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: So who knows? I do know one person who is a speed reader who said that she didn’t like short sentences because the periods make her stop. Otherwise, she reads really fast. But I don’t think that’s a normal taste that most people have. I don’t know, maybe that’s a common thing among speed readers. I couldn’t say for sure, but that would be a little different than average. 

Oren: If your story has too many short sentences too close together, people will start to describe it as “choppy”. But it will also have a similar problem if sentences are too long, too often. You need a mix of both most of the time. 

Chris: You need variety in your sentence length and form. For sure. 

Oren: Another kind of emotional aspect of this discourse sometimes seems to be this fear over authors who originally wanted to do like an anime or a TV show or a comic book, and those are expensive and hard to do, so they want to write a book instead. And it’s like, okay, again, I get it. I understand the emotional reaction. But first of all, it’s 2026. Let’s just be grateful that they are actually trying to write something themselves instead of just using a slop generator, which is a thing that some people do now. So it’s like, let’s not punish the behavior we want to see.

Chris: I think we all need to keep in mind, again, it can be, if you’ve been doing this for a while, it might be easy to lose touch with what you were saying, with the level that people start out at, right? Which is very basic. And if somebody−, let’s say you had somebody who really wasn’t into books, right? They like to play video games, watch shows, and then they had just had a story idea. As many of us do at some point. And then it was like, okay, well I can’t make a video game and I can’t make a show, but I can write a novel. That person is in for quite the workout when it comes to learning all of that stuff that they need to learn. And they’re not going to make it unless they can deal with words. They’re just not. That’s tough. That’s really tough. It’s a huge, huge thing to take on if you don’t like the written word at all. So, yeah, I think that person is probably just mostly in for a load of hurt if they don’t… unless they actually take to it, unless they actually appreciate the medium.

Oren: Which is what my advice to them is. If that’s something you want, right? If you are like, hey, I haven’t read books much, but I play these video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has really inspired me and I want to write. Okay! Great, but much the same way as if you were a novelist who wanted to do a video game, you gotta learn what you’re doing or you’re just going to crash and burn. It’s not gonna be a fun time. And, we don’t get to see that reversal that often because it’s actually very hard to get into a position where you can have the resources to make a video game or be in charge of a TV show. But every once in a while we see a novelist put in that position without a lot of experience, and, uh, it shows. 

Chris: It shows. Different mediums are different! Which is one thing when I get worried when a novelist gets an adaptation and gets too much control and is gonna be running the screenplay…

Oren: Yeah… no thank you. 

Chris: I think the latest one is, it looks like Sanderson is going to be writing some of his own screenplays, and he at least is humble enough that I believe he will get help. So, if it’s okay, that’s going to be why. 

Oren: He has oddly talked about how he wouldn’t want to do that in the past because he has acknowledged that screenwriting is a different skill. So…

Chris: So he appreciates it. He appreciates it. But his humility might pay off for him there, right? But for a lot of writers, novelists, that would not work out and not be a good idea. Plus, the thing is about having somebody else do the adaptation is if they’re any good, they can spot problems that you did not spot and do neat little fixes for them. 

Oren: Yeah. Get you someone who loves your book the way the people who made the Strange and Norrell adaptation loved that book. Man, that is a loving adaptation. Same thing with the Interview with the Vampire show. At least, the first season. Just like. Wow, they clearly are so into the material that they not only faithfully adapted it, but they actually improved it in ways that are really hard and that, like, book nerds tend to assume never happen because the trope is that the adaptation makes it worse. 

Chris: Or like the Lockwood and Co. adaptation to the TV show where it looks like it’s almost all the same, but if you read the book right after you look at the show or vice versa, you’ll see there’s all these like very neat, you know, small edits that do a world of good, and really smooth the story out and fix all its little flaws but keeping it mostly the same.

Oren: For one, the biggest example is that they toned down the degree to which the main characters are mean to each other just a little bit. Like, they toned it down just a little so that now they are, they seem like they’re stressed out and sharp-tongued and they give each other a hard time as opposed to sometimes in the book, it really boils over and just makes it seem like, wow, they hate each other, I guess. You know, I really wish the show−, I mean, I wish the show had continued for a bunch of reasons, but I was really curious what they would’ve done with Holly. Because in the books, Holly is introduced to be the next like, because Lucy, the main character, has sort of settled enough of her differences with George that they aren’t constantly fighting, so we introduced Holly to be the next character, the next coworker that she doesn’t like. 

But it’s kind of gross. It’s very like, “ooh, girl fight” kind of thing. And I don’t like it. It’s not my favorite. And I was really curious to see what the show was going to do with that.

Chris: And I stand by my assertion that it was all Lockwood’s fault, and he completely escaped any blame for that situation.

Oren: He did cause a lot of that problem by being a bad boss. But as we know, he’s a beautiful, special boy, and he can’t be blamed for anything. 

Chris: I don’t think that it’s really a problem for people to change mediums because if they don’t like the writing medium, they’re just going to get in trouble. And I understand why people do it, too, right? Because it’s something they can do on their own. Some people can write comics on their own, but you have to really−, with comics, it’s really all about the drawing. And if you just want to write for a comic, trying to find an artist−I’ve been asked about that before−you cannot count on fighting an artist if you want to write for a comic because it’s really the artist that gets to call the shots usually. Unless you’re already a famous writer or something like that. Generally, that’s the person who has the more obviously hard skill I would say, instead of soft skill, so it’s the artist that gets to pick the writer, not vice versa. And often artists want to write for their own comics, but if you really like drawing, that’s another one you can do besides writing. But, you’re going to spend most of your time drawing, not making up the story. 

Oren: Yeah, drawing comics takes a long time. All right. Well, with that, I think we have more or less answered the question, which is actually very easy to answer, but it’s more interesting to explore the reasons why it becomes a question in the first place. So, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Now, if you want to read with us, you can join our Patreon to participate in our quarterly book club coming up. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.