Sian Meades-Williams reflects on reading as a writer, from carving out the time to learning from every page.

The year I became a full-time freelance writer, I didn’t read a single book.

As unlikely as it sounds for anyone working with words, without my daily commute it was unexpectedly easy to slip out of the habit that had been a part of my whole life. Almost twenty years later, I watched the same thing happen to writers during lockdown.

People are quick to tell you that you’re not a writer unless you read a certain number of books a year. Often these people are strangers on the internet with no direct knowledge of your life of creativity, but that doesn’t seem to stop them. Social media has made us performative about every aspect of our lives and that includes our bookshelves. Inevitably, the number has become more important than what we take from the act itself. People crow about how many books they read each year, month, even in a day. Tiktok users are, inexplicably, bragging about three-figure book tallies, when in fact they’ve used AI to give them a summary of the novels on their TBR shelf.

We all know what we like in a book, and we know what stops us in our tracks. That’s what I want to learn as a writer. It’s the moment in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, the turn of phrase in any Amor Towels novel, or the tension in the first chapter of Ghost Wall (and anything else Sarah Moss has written). For you it might be a specific passage in Wolf Hall, or the part in a whodunnit where you finally find out whodidit. We can learn so much from other people’s words; why a certain line works, how much to hold back in a chapter opening, what description knocks the wind out of us.

I don’t track the number of books I read, but I do like to give myself little reading exercises. A couple of years ago I read all of the Women’s Prize winners going back to 1996 – worth it for A Spell of Winter alone. This year I’m reading a book each month by a woman from a country I’ve never been to. Having a reading goal that’s about content gets me out of my comfort zone. Otherwise every book I picked up would be set in mid-Century New York or Victorian London. We all have a type.

Having a type can be a tricky business as a writer. My novel is set in the well-trodden ground of Victorian London and rather than reading fiction directly around the world I’m creating, I try to take a different approach. I’ve read dozens of books about unconventional working women, and sought out novels with tricky friendships at their heart. The books I explore about mother/daughter relationships cover every possible time period.

Understanding where your book sits on the shelves is an important part of the writing business, but I save my Victorian London novels for the beach. By choosing to explore the possibilities and conflicts at the heart of my world, rather than its setting, my reading has broadened and hopefully I’ve avoided the trap of emulating someone else’s words.

I learn more from reading through osmosis than I realise – sometimes I can feel the passages I underlined by Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf dating back to my university days. I’ve read the flea chapter in Hamnet at least two dozen times and take something different from it each time. Sometimes it’s a poem to kickstart my writing time, or wise words from Anne Lamott. It took me a long time to get back in the habit, but these days I consider reading a vital part of my writing. It’s commitment to your craft.

We’ve all raced to the end of a book we’re not into just so we can ‘tick it off’, but we don’t take anything away from books we aren’t engaged in. Instead we should be making the most of our local libraries, chatting to booksellers and following our noses. That strange novel book about topiary won’t get you clicks on Instagram but it might help you to expand your character’s sub-plot with more depth and understanding than you could wish for. It’s that depth that becomes the key to improving your reading skills as a writer.

We can always read wider, more adventurously, and be more considered with the authors we choose to spend time with, but ultimately we read for connection, empathy, and to make sense of the world. And, of course, for joy. It’s no coincidence that those are also the reasons we write.