My friend Joe Rockey told me on one of our calls that he can’t find time for reading anymore. “I can listen, but I can’t read.”
“I haven’t read a book in probably five years,” I said. “I’ve read snippets of books. I just don’t have the time.”
Joe thought that was awesome coming from a man who writes books for a living. He asked whether I lead with it in my advertising. Probably not, I told him. I’m saying it here anyway, because the writing world has a polite fiction about authors and reading, and I think it’s nonsense. A working writer’s relationship with books changes over a career, and mine changed so far that the shelf behind me on video calls is a prop.
Five years without reading a whole book
That admission sounds worse than it is. I still read snippets of books, the chapter or the page that answers the question in front of me. What I don’t do anymore is start a book on page one and walk all the way to the last page.
Time killed it. I’ve authored 113+ books, and I take six to eight ghostwriting clients a year, working on several books at once, each at a different stage. Every hour inside somebody else’s novel is an hour away from my own manuscript or a client’s. Something had to give, and the something was reading for pleasure.
Ask the writing world what a real writer looks like and you’ll get one picture. That writer reads fifty books a year, keeps a reading journal, posts a finished reading challenge every December and has opinions about every literary prize. The people who push that picture hardest have never sat down at seven in the morning with a contract date three weeks out and a chapter that refuses to work. Reading for pleasure takes a kind of leisure I traded away when writing became my job.
I’m fine with the trade.
Do writers need to read a lot to write well?
When you’re learning, yes. After that, a lot less than the advice claims.
Stephen King put the standard line bluntly in On Writing, published in 2000: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” Writing teachers have been quoting it at students for a quarter century. King’s right about the tools. He’s wrong if anybody takes it as a rule for the whole of a career.
A writer’s tools get built early. Years of reading teach you how a sentence moves, how a scene turns and how a story holds a reader past midnight, long before you know the words for any of it. Rhythm and structure soak in from thousands of pages. That reading goes into the foundation, and a foundation doesn’t need to be poured again every year.
Nobody tells a carpenter with forty years in the trade to go back and read the textbook every night before bed.
The advice-industry version of this rule makes me crazy. Read a hundred books a year, read in your genre, read the classics, and somehow also write a thousand words a day and hold down a job. A beginner hears that, falls behind on the reading list in a month and decides they aren’t a real writer. That guilt can stop a person who has a good book in them. Read hard while you’re learning. Once you’re writing for real, read what the work needs, and quit apologizing for the rest.
The bookshelf behind me is a stage set
If you’ve been on a video call with me, you’ve seen the shelves. I built them on purpose. They’re there because a wall of books makes a man look like a writer on camera.
A sitcom kitchen on television looks perfect from the audience’s seat. Look behind it and the cabinets have no backs, the stove has never been lit and the refrigerator is plywood. The kitchen does its job, and its job is to look like a kitchen for the length of a scene.
My shelves work the same way. Look closely and a lot of what’s up there is Peanuts. Those are collections of the comic strips, and when somebody calls them comic books I correct them. Strip books. They’re comic strips. The rest is science fiction and fantasy, things like Game of Thrones, and most of those are limited editions. Nobody on the other side of the camera can tell what’s on the spines from that distance, and that’s fine with me.
Bookcase credentials got so silly during the 2020 lockdowns that people ran whole social media accounts rating the rooms behind experts on television news. Guests started arranging their spines like set decorators. It makes me laugh, and I’ve got my own set anyway, because the camera doesn’t care whether you’ve read anything. A camera only cares what’s behind your head.
The shelf behind me is set dressing. The books I’ve written are the only proof I’m a writer. – Richard LoweShare on X
When is a print book worth buying?
Almost never, in my house. A physical copy comes home with me only when it’s a limited edition or a signed one.
Who’s got space? I don’t collect books anymore, partly because I couldn’t remember why I’d bought a lot of them. A lot of them ended up in the discard pile and went to the library. I’m sure the library sells them. Fair enough. There are a lot of stupid books out there.
My Kindle took over the rest. As of 2024 I had more than sixteen hundred titles in that account. A digital library costs no shelf space and searches in seconds, so a reference book needed once a year lives there and costs nothing while it waits.
If you’re drowning in books, ask yourself a few questions before you keep a print copy.
Would you be upset if it vanished tomorrow? Will you open it again in the next five years? Is the object itself special, signed or numbered or out of print? If the answer to all three is no, give it to a library or a friend who’ll read it.
Many public libraries pass donations to a friends group that sells them to fund programs, so even the books nobody borrows do some good. I wrote a whole book about letting go of possessions, The Dead Don’t Need Stuff, and the same rules apply to books.
Check before you haul boxes over, though. Some libraries take donations only on certain days, some won’t take textbooks or encyclopedias, and almost none want anything moldy or water damaged. A phone call saves you a wasted trip.
A piece of Linotype I’ve kept since I was a kid
I’ve given away boxes of books. I still have a piece of Linotype metal.
When I was a kid, six years old or eight or something, we went on a tour of a newspaper, and they handed us one of those slugs. I still have it.
How many people can say they have a bit of Linotype? How many people even know what that means?
The Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler and first put to work at the New York Tribune in 1886, let an operator type a line of text on a keyboard while the machine cast the whole line as one solid bar of hot metal. Line o’ type. Before it, compositors set every letter by hand from a type case, one piece at a time, and a big daily paper needed a small army of them.
One operator on a Linotype did the work of several. Newspapers ran on those machines for nearly a century.
The New York Times printed its last edition set in hot metal on July 2, 1978, and computers took over the composing room. The slug handed to a kid on a newspaper tour came from a machine that was already on borrowed time, though nobody on the tour knew it.
A slug is words you can hold. Somebody sat at a keyboard and turned a sentence into metal, and a press turned the metal into a newspaper a whole city read before breakfast. Everything on my shelves was chosen to look good on camera. That slug was handed to me on a tour, and decades later it’s still here. I’d hate to lose it.
What does a working writer read instead of whole books?
Pieces. A working writer reads with a purpose and leaves when the purpose is met.
One of the books I wrote had several hundred references. Nobody reads several hundred books cover to cover for a project like that. You find the chapter that holds the fact, read enough around it to understand it in context, note the exact chapter or paragraph it came from and move on. That’s still reading, and it’s hard reading, because you have to know a field well enough to land on the right twenty pages.
Apply the same discipline when a machine does the first search for you, and I’ve written about using AI for research without getting burned.
Then there’s the reading nobody counts. A ghostwriter reads every chapter of a draft over and over, checking the voice, the facts and the flow, and then reads the client’s notes on it. That adds up to more hours on the page than most book clubs log. It just isn’t the kind of reading that goes on a list.
Stories still get in. They come through a different door. Close to a thousand of my movie reviews sit on this site, and I’ve made the case before for what watching television does for a writer. Dialogue, structure, the cut that leaves before the scene goes stale: a good film hands you all of that in two hours, and you can watch a scene three times in a row to see how it was built.
How do busy writers fit reading into a full schedule?
Read the way a mechanic uses a manual. Open the table of contents, find the chapter you need and read that chapter.
Use the index and the search box. A Kindle edition searches the whole book for a phrase in a second, and a print index does the same job a little slower. When you find what you came for, mark it, note the page or location, and get out. Write down the source the moment you use it, too. Nothing wastes an afternoon like hunting for a quote you read three weeks ago and didn’t note.
Sample your market. Every online bookstore lets you read the opening pages of a book for free, so read the first chapter of five recent bestsellers in your category. You’ll learn more about what readers in that genre expect from those openings than from finishing any one of them.
Quit any book that loses you. You owe the author nothing past the page where they lost you.
And if your eyes are done for the day, listen. Joe’s way works. An audiobook in the car or on a walk is still a book going into your head, and a lot of busy people get all their reading that way now. Readers didn’t go anywhere either, despite what the doom crowd says about who still reads books. The formats multiplied.
Should a professional writer admit to not reading books?
Joe’s question about my advertising deserves a straight answer.
I won’t put it on a billboard. But the author-bio cliché of the “lifelong voracious reader” drives me nuts, because it’s written for an imaginary audience of English teachers. People who hire a ghostwriter want somebody who can take what’s in their head and get it onto the page so it reads like them and holds a stranger’s attention for two hundred pages. That skill gets built by writing, and kept sharp by writing.
Anybody can write a stupid book. Plenty of people who read constantly have written one. The whole goal with a client is to make the book right and keep it off that pile, and no number of finished novels on a reading list would help with that.
The industry wants writers to perform being readers, the same way it wants authors to perform being on social media every day. Both performances eat the hours a book needs. My hours go to the work, and nobody’s permission is required for that.
What reading means to me now
Reading still matters to me. It changed shape. Once it was a door you walked through every night for the pleasure of the trip. Today it’s a toolbox I open for the job in front of me and close again when the job is done.
If you’re starting out, read like your career depends on it, because it does, and the writing hub has more on building those tools.
If you’ve got a book in you and no hours to write it, my ghostwriting service puts somebody who writes every day on your side. The shelf behind me will keep playing its part on camera like the plywood refrigerator in a sitcom kitchen. The slug of Linotype from that newspaper tour is solid metal all the way through. So are the books I’ve written, and I’m damn proud of them.
