In the first of a regular column tackling the fundamentals of creative writing, acclaimed author and creative writing tutor Ian Ayris looks at reading and the writer

Ian Ayris

In this article I want to look at reading as it pertains to the writer. I saw something incredibly depressing – I think on Twitter – a few months ago. By averaging how long they take to read a book, then taking into account their current age, someone worked out how many books they could possibly read in the years they had left. The answer was comparatively few. In the hundreds, I think. The crushing truth is we do only have so much time on this wonderful planet, and there really are only so many books we’ll get to read. Stephen King says in his seminal On Writing we should read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If we had the life of Stephen King – and he so deserves that life being, in my mind, the writer’s writer par excellence – then perhaps we would. But most of us haven’t. His emphasis on the importance of reading, however, holds true. So, with the limited time we have and the millions of books out there, how can we as writers focus our reading to enhance our writing?

What to read?

Let’s begin with the classics.

Classics

A classic is conventionally seen as a book that has – in that awful cliché – stood the test of time. A classic could also be the finest example of a style of writing or genre or a groundbreaking form of writing. It could simply be an identifiable high point in the history of literature. But all this, as in most things in the world of books, is subjective. One reader’s classic is another reader’s pretentious doorstop or sleeping tablet. There are vast lists of classics on the internet, going as far back as pre-history and Homer, through antiquity, the middle ages up to the late Victorians. But do we need to read them? Yes. Writing, like most things, has evolved over time. Think of the millions and millions of books that have been published since there was such a thing. Why have these few hundred books survived? Why can we all name – even on a tired day – twenty or so authors we would consider classic authors – even if we have read none of their work? We stand on the shoulders of giants, people. If you are a writer, you would do well to read the great writers of yesteryear, those giants upon whose shoulders we all stand.