When I taught creative writing classes, I would tell my students—often—that you can’t be a good writer without reading. I would say, “You have to read to write.”

I still hold to that, but as a writer who loves reading, it sometimes creates a tug of war with my time. In fact, if you were to chart it, I probably spend three to five hours reading for every single hour of writing. Maybe, with those odds, I should call myself a professional reader instead of a professional writer!

I generally can’t fall asleep at night without reading. Depending on the degree of that sleeplessness, that can mean reading anywhere from five minutes to two hours. I also start my day with reading, but in that case it’s the Bible and my devotional books. So beyond bookending my day with books (pun intended), it is also the way we unwind in the family. There are days that the TV never gets turned on. However, days without reading do not exist.

That said, I am the lone hold out in the family that is, like much of our society, turning increasingly to audiobooks. People seem to read less and less each year. That’s disheartening for a writer. But audiobooks, unless I’m driving, hold no appeal for me. There are a few major reasons for that. 1) I read faster than an audiobook talks. A lot faster. If it has text scrolling by, like my Kindle often does, I find myself too far ahead to keep listening. 2) I am a visual learner. If I hear something, including a book, I’m likely to forget large swathes of it. I remember, and enjoy more, what I see. 3) If I get in the reading zone, it’s like watching a movie in my head. There comes a point where even though I’m reading, I see the story and not the words.

One of the cool things about tutoring is reading all the curriculum that they use. For instance, I learned via tutoring that hummingbirds can’t survive more than a few minutes without eating, you can see farther and clearer in outer space because gravity doesn’t distort the eyeballs, and that Pocahontas was the nickname, meaning playful, for the Native American girl named Matoaka.

You learn the most fascinating things by reading.

Granted, most of the time when I am reading, I am reading to escape, to be entertained. But even then, stray facts can slip through that make me go, ‘huh, imagine that.’

Beyond those sources, I enjoy researching so I will invest a lot of my reading time into writing prep. How do they conduct a dig near the beach? How does the archaeological radar find traces of industry underground? Those facts weave credibility into my mystery series. There are some unfinished books where I have enough research material to make a book of its own. What was civilization like, for instance, in medieval Florence? Or how might you create/distill water in an enclosed society? (Two different books if not obvious from the topics.)

But to be a writer, I have to make an effort to write. Currently, I’m trying to maintain the 1-5 ratio as an absolute minimum. There are times that the activities do overlap, though. Often when doing my devotional reading, I will write a poem in my journal. A lot of time when I am working on a story, I will write a few lines, then go and read something for a couple of pages and then bounce back to writing.

In the best of worlds, they complement each other. But, for me, it is so much easier to read than it is to write. So much easier that sometimes I will let myself go down the rabbit trail of reading for hour upon hour and never turn the corner into productivity.

But I learned a long time ago, that if I don’t write at all, I am miserable. Reading and never writing is like the Dead Sea. The life of the Jordan River flows into it, but it has nowhere to go, no outlet. It stagnates and becomes uninhabitable. However, when I read and write, I am more like the Sea of Galilee. Life abounds within me and I have a way to share it with others.

If you see me getting grumpy, therefore, remind me to pick up my pen and write!

*this is a modified version of a previous post