Writing isn’t just the expression of thought — it’s the creation of it

Reading isn’t just writing prep; together, reading and writing help writers think and generate original ideas through extended cognition.

This week, I explore why great writers don’t read passively to receive information, but actively read to form new and original ideas.

Credit: William Bromley / Jacob Hege / Big Think

By Kevin Dickinson

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. […] You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do. […] If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

For me, this is the single best piece of advice on offer in Stephen King’s On Writing (2000). Finding the time to read and reading widely are necessary not only for fiction writers but for anyone who wishes to express their ideas in writing.

It’s so fundamental to the craft that it’s not difficult to find other writers offering the same advice. William Faulkner probably gave it its most famous and quotable form: “Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!” But my favorite rendition comes from Terry Pratchett: “Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.”

Of course, the benefits of reading — such as improved concentration, boosted empathy, and reduced stress — are well known. But these are not the reasons writers recommend a voracious reading habit. If we dig a bit deeper, we can see they have something else in mind.

Consider, for instance, how Margaret Atwood phrased the advice in Second Words (1984): “It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.” Annie Proulx gave the same guidance more succinctly when she noted, “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

For these writers, reading isn’t just about expanding one’s vocabulary, mastering sentence structure, or learning to make a simile shine. They are making a more foundational case: Reading supplies writers with the raw materials for thinking on the page. Together, reading and writing form a single cognitive loop, and it’s only by engaging with both that we can transform the vague notions bouncing around in our minds into original ideas on the page.

Writing to someone else’s tune?

What’s perhaps odd here is that these authors felt the need to advise other writers to read in the first place. Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I don’t hear filmmakers advising other filmmakers over the need to watch movies or painters reminding their fellow brush jockeys to visit a gallery now and again.

Somehow, the relationship between reading and writing has become, if not unknown, at least underappreciated, and I would wager the reason stems from several misconceptions in the popular imagination.

For one, reading and writing are often seen as two distinct activities — one passive, the other active. We view reading (or listening) as simply an act of receiving, while writing (or speaking) is the act of giving. The written word acts like a kind of mental modem, moving communications from one head to another.

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I imagine this misconception stems from our school years — for many, the most writerly time of our lives. Here, reading and writing are treated as distinct processes: We read to take in information about a subject, and then we write to report what we have retained. Rather than a coordinated creative process, reading is the precursor to the test, and writing is a means of demonstrating what’s in our heads.

Another misconception is that outside influences corrupt the purity of our ideas and voices. This is the view that original ideas are crafted out of whole cloth. Reading while writing is equivalent to cheating on the test. You aren’t presenting your own answers; you’re literally copying out of the book.

Now, there’s no one way that any writer must pursue their craft, and some writers do feel the need to isolate themselves as much as possible to work. The novelist Zadie Smith compares them to solo violinists “who need complete silence to tune their instruments.” Or if you prefer the more Hollywood version: the writers who lock themselves in their studies to write their masterpieces in a sleepless, three-day sprint — influenced only by their genius and bottle of choice.

The misconception here is that abstaining from outside influences is the only way to pursue truly original work. Many writers, including Smith, read to seek out the influence and inspiration of other writers.

“My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight,” she writes.

Smith compares this approach to musicians who want to “hear every member of the orchestra.” Playing alongside the melodious winds and pounding percussion of other musicians, a violinist can blend their sound together to create something with more depth of expression than any one instrument can manage alone. And reading provides writers with their intellectual orchestra.

From this vantage point, originality isn’t isolation; it’s the synthesis of different voices and ideas coming together to form something new.

For Smith, one of the great orchestral writers is the Romantic poet John Keats. Keats came to his art with an apprentice mindset, finding his concertmasters in the library. Anyone familiar with his poetry can see the influence of Shakespeare and Spenser at play. In their plays and poems, Keats learned how to express and transform his ideas through clever turns of phrase, an illuminating metaphor, or a lilting assonance. Yet one would be hard-pressed to say their inclusion makes Keats’s work any less original.

“He never feared influence — he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own.” Smith adds. “The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind.”

Connecting the dots

History is full of examples of writers drawing influence from disparate sources. Sometimes, as Smith noted above, these influences help steer a writer’s voice or expression. Other times, drawing influence from another discipline can help a writer explain their ideas through a memorable metaphor or analogy — such as Sigmund Freud using the story of Oedipus to explain his psychoanalytic theories, or Thomas Kuhn borrowing from political history for his concept of scientific paradigm shifts. Still other authors find seemingly unrelated influences through reading and fuse them together, inspiring their most original and famous works.

Mary Shelley drew from Gothic fiction, Greek mythology, and the then-cutting-edge science of galvanism to write Frankenstein (1818). In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin combined her lifelong interests in anthropology and Taoism with an alien contact story. One more example: Octavia Butler connected biology, mythology, and sociology with the history of colonization and slavery to craft Lilith’s Brood (1987–89).

These influences are obvious if you’ve read the stories, but in true orchestral fashion, it’s the bringing of these ideas and voices together that created something completely new. And while all my examples are science fiction — I’m on a bit of a kick at the moment — this connection of writing with reading has sparked originality across genres and domains.

Consider Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin didn’t happen upon evolution thanks to a eureka moment on the Galapagos Islands. The idea was already swimming through Victorian academic society. George Cuvier had established extinction as a reality in natural history, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had developed a theory of species change through inherited traits. Even Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, put forth an evolutionary inkling of an idea in a poem.

Darwin’s contribution was to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection, providing a foundational mechanism for understanding how species change over time. He managed this not only by being observant, patient, and thoughtful, but also by taking his cues from the other members of his orchestra.

These included Charles Lyell’s The Principles of Geology (1830–33) — which presented Darwin with a theory of geological history that allowed his own theory to work — and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) — which, while about economics, nonetheless spurred Darwin to think about the struggle for survival and reproduction. Then there was William Paley’s Natural Theology, which inspired Darwin to appreciate the forms of species and how those forms adapted to their environments — even if the two thinkers reached wildly different conclusions.

While Darwin’s once-in-a-generation genius is difficult to undersell, he would also be the first to credit the many different ideas and theories he encountered during his reading.

Or, as Philip Pullman put it: “When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. […] Readers ask me all the time the traditional question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’”

Thinking on the page

Even with his orchestra, Darwin didn’t simply transplant the theory of evolution by natural selection from his head to the page. He further sharpened and refined it through extensive correspondence and in penning On the Origin. Reading and writing weren’t separate activities for Darwin; together, they formed a type of extended cognition.

As William Zinsser points out in Writing to Learn (1988): “Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know — and what we don’t know — about whatever we’re trying to learn.”

In that book, Zinsser argues that writing isn’t simply the act of putting thoughts on a page; the very act of writing is an act of thinking.

Because writing is a physical activity — whether we use a word processor or pen and paper — it gives our thoughts a form we can interact with. Seeing a thought on the page can clue us into where our understanding may be cloudy, where a hole may trip up our logic, or where we may need to check our facts. It further allows us to shape our thoughts by sharpening our sentences, reorganizing the structure, or refining our expressions.

This process doesn’t just make our ideas more presentable on the page; it transforms them. (When writers say, “The only kind of writing is rewriting,” they have something like this in mind.) Reading can support this thinking process by connecting us with other ideas and voices.

For these reasons, Zinsser thought that students should be required to read and write across the curriculum. Mathematicians who could present the solutions to their formulas, anthropologists who could explain their theories, and musical theorists who could demystify their frameworks in writing wouldn’t just teach their readers; in the process, they would learn more about their subjects and come away with other ideas to pursue.

As with the authors quoted throughout this essay, for Zinsser, reading isn’t just a way to onboard new information, and writing isn’t just a way to tell the world what we know. They are a way to think and learn throughout our lives. Or, as he puts it in his other classic, On Writing Well (1976): “I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.”

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