Writing books but not a reader?

[AgeBeforeBeauty]

Just wondering if it is madness. I don't read books, but like writing and have lots of ideas. Presumably as I don't really read fiction, there's not much chance of getting published?

Equally they might not, but you’d have no idea either way.

You obviously are a reader, you just have stopped reading books for the sake of it. I'm a reader but there have been times in my life I don't read at all. And times I can only read rubbish, and times I can't bear to read rubbish. If a book can't draw you in then it's not a very good book, but sometimes it can't draw you in because you're not in a frame of mind where you care. Sometimes books are just boring, or too complicated for me to concentrate on. Sometimes the characters are so unsympathetic I don't care what happens to them. Sometimes I just don't want to read anything depressing.

What were your favourite books when you used to read?

Watership Down started as a story told to entertain children on car journeys. I think The Hobbit was a bedtime story. Paddington was a stuffed bear in the Bonds' flat. Writers make up stories. Readers read them. I'm sure better writers read a lot because inspiration, research, vocabulary, grammar.

JK Rowling is a writer and extremely successful because of a story and world she created rather than being an excellent writer. DS didn't even bother finishing the last one.

John McGahern won a Booker prize for That They May Face the Rising Sun (one of my favourite books) and hardly anything actually happens in the book but it's beautiful.

There are all kinds of writers.

Maybe try short stories first, and submit to a magazine? Heck, life is too short not to do what makes you happy. Just don’t have too many expectations.

I honestly can’t even... you don’t read books? I edit for a living and read for pleasure every day too. How can you not?

I hate this narrow minded type of opinion. Some people read, some don't. I'm sure there's a lot of thing you don't do that others enjoy. Get your head outside of your bubble.

If fiction makes you nervous, are there any subjects you're passionate about that could be the subject of a non-fiction book or article?

But, if you want to write fiction, just get writing and see what happens! What's the worst that can happen?

If you don’t read because you haven’t got the patience it’s hard to fathom how you write an entire book. It’s hard going!

I think if you’ve been a reader in the past but aren’t currently you can make it work. If you’ve never been a reader you might have more trouble.

I don’t think not reading is necessarily a terrible hindrance to coming up with stories, but my concern would be that if you’ve not read much fiction the prose style could come off as very amateurish.

I (try to!) write. I used to be a reader but since losing my attention span due to terrible trauma a few years ago I have struggled to finish reading a book. It’s important to find workarounds - read poetry; read as much of a book as you can be bothered with, just to get a feel for it; watch TV shows and indie movies with excellent plots and character development. And don’t force yourself to read things you hate (e.g if you find classic books dull, stick to modern ones and vice versa).

I would say it is possible to be a writer but not a reader, but unlikely to be successful for more than one book. You might strike it lucky with a single book but I'd suspect you would struggle to continue.

Telling stories for your family children who are fascinated doesn't actually show any great story potential.
I used to make up stories for ds at bed time. I called them "the stories where nothing happened". They were dreadful as stories, but he used to beg for them.

They went along the lines of "One day Ellie Elephant and Panda went for a walk. "Let's go to the seaside," said Ellie. "Good idea," said Panda.
So they went to the ticket office and asked for a train ticket to the seaside. The train went "clickety-clack, clickety-clack" all the way until they got off. They rushed down onto the sand and remembered that they'd forgotten to bring their bucket. So they went to the seaside shop to buy one. Ellie bought a blue one shaped like a castle, and Panda bought a green round one...."

Nothing more exciting than that happened, yet ds loved them.

OP, in the nicest possible way, when you tell stories to your children or nephews and nieces, you have a captive audience. They know you, they love you, and more important, you know them and what kinds of stories/characters/situations they like. You have them in the room in front of you and can judge when they're getting bored or sleepy, and, most of all, you can do a lot of the work with your voice and face, acting out characters, creating suspense, adding humour etc.

When you publish a children's book, you have none of the advantages that you have in a 'live' situation with a captive audience that is already predisposed to be interested in what you have to say.

You've never met your audience and you don't know who they are. What works with your 'live' voice simply won't transfer effectively to the page, and you will have to do a lot of work to try to recreate the effects, and to create something which will keep a strange reader gripped.

You will need to figure out exactly what age range you are targeting, and what else that reader is likely to have read -- if there's already a hugely popular series out there about Icelandic fairies who train dragons, then you're going to need to come up with something else.

Depending on what age range you are writing for, it may be likely that an adult will buy the book for a child -- you need to stop that adult putting your book back down on the Three for Two table at Waterstones' and picking up something else.

And to even get to your audience, you will need the beginning of your children's book to be so good that an agent's assistant reading through the slushpile late on Friday afternoon sits up, reads it again, and passes it to the agent immediately. Then, once you're signed with an agent, that process needs to happen all over again with an editor who can get your book past acquisitions and marketing and thinks it will sell -- and agents and editors spend their lives reading books in the field you're targeting. Brutally speaking, if you want to publish your books, you need to be better than the competition, which means you need to read the competition.

Obviously, not reading is fine if you are happy to write a book which is only for your children -- but you talked upthread about publishing.

I would just write, see how it goes dor a few weeks, then find a group and share your stuff. The more you do it tje less precious you get and the more the mechanics are revealed.

Appreciate the thoughts, especially the more supportive comments :)

Sounds as though I wouldn't be very successful. But then again, no harm in starting to write and just going with the flow. It will probably take several years to finish anything in any case, what with my impatience. Again, it would be to share my imagination with the world, rather than to become a bestselling author or make a living out of it. After all, surely people need new material all the time?

May be I won't write to publish, just write for me and mine.

Sounds as though I wouldn't be very successful.

No one can possibly tell until you have written something. I really don’t think theorising will help here. I imagine most people want to feel that the writers they read care about literature. And writers generally want to feel that other writers have served an apprenticeship - via reading. Not (purely) for reasons of intellectual snobbery but because one feels that if a person doesn’t have the patience to engage with fictional characters then they probably lack insight into real lives.

If you feel you have some other route into understanding human beings - and can translate that understanding into fiction, go ahead. All good literature is welcome.

It will probably take several years to finish anything in any case, what with my impatience.
Not necessarily to finish a first draft. Why don't you try NaNoWriMo
It's where you aim to write 50k words in a month (November)
It's pretty good for a children's book as 50k is about what I write for one.
I've done it twice and it's a challenge, but not a unrealistic one if you write every day.

Obviously the editing comes after and that can take a very long time, which is where the patience comes in.

Again, it would be to share my imagination with the world, rather than to become a bestselling author or make a living out of it. After all, surely people need new material all the time? That's the point that we're making with the not reading. if you don't read, how will you know that your material is new and exciting-it may well be that what you think is unique and exciting has a large number of books on almost identical material which isn't selling well, even at The Works.

"One day Ellie Elephant and Panda went for a walk. "Let's go to the seaside," said Ellie. "Good idea," said Panda.
So they went to the ticket office and asked for a train ticket to the seaside. The train went "clickety-clack, clickety-clack" all the way until they got off. They rushed down onto the sand and remembered that they'd forgotten to bring their bucket. So they went to the seaside shop to buy one. Ellie bought a blue one shaped like a castle, and Panda bought a green round one...."

Zillions of published and beloved children's books are exactly like that. Spot the dog comes to mind

Zillions of published and beloved children's books are exactly like that. Spot the dog comes to mind
That is true, but how many were published from an unknown without something to make them stand out. They also then have to hit the right publisher.

Spot the Dog, for example, was the first to be published with lift-the-flaps. I remember it well because dm was not particularly impressed because she'd approached a publisher around 4 years earlier with the idea and been told "children wouldn't be interested".

We loved them though.

she'd approached a publisher around 4 years earlier with the idea and been told "children wouldn't be interested"

That's awful!

John McGahern won a Booker prize for That They May Face the Rising Sun (one of my favourite books) and hardly anything actually happens in the book but it's beautiful.

Agreed that it's an astonishing and beautiful novel, but it took him ten years to write, so the simplicity is deceptive -- and for all the 'I'm a plain Leitrim farmer' image, this is a man who had read everything. He says himself that he would never have become a writer had he not had access to a small local library as a child, where he read everything from Dickens and Walter Scott to cowboy pulp novels the way a later generation would watch TV.

Oh, and what I actually meant to say is that children's writing is hard. A friend of mine, who is a well-known novelist (who has been the Mumsnet Book of the Month author more than once) wrote a children's story based on one she'd told her own children at bedtime, rather than her usual adult novels, thought she'd done a fair job, but it never came anywhere near selling, despite her established name and healthy sales record.

It probably feels like people are shouting you down, but tbh until you start writing ideas are just that - most writers have more ideas than they can handle. It's the getting them onto paper that's the hard bit.

And to my mind - but I could be wrong - that bit's easier to do successfully if you read too. It makes it easier when you come to edit and say to yourself 'what is this chapter doing?', 'what would make the reader carry on after this chapter?' 'is this character likeable?'

If you think you have some strong premises though, why not pick one and start writing? You won't know until you try.

Sorry OP to answer your question above, some people do find they begin to emulate the person they're reading, but it's actually to give you an idea of what works and what doesn't. You might find that someone who writes in the first person annoys you so e.g. someone said 'I approached the door, my heart hammering in my chest,' as opposed to 'Sarah approached the door, her heart hammering in her chest.' You might find you like books with a lot of description in them, or descriptiveness might bore you and you might want more dialogue and action. In eg thrillers theres atmospheric 'slow burners' that are building you up for the big frights, or fast paced book that have you thinking 'what else can possibly happen?!' There's books of short stories or poetry. But remember none of this is looking for the big publishing deal, you have to enjoy writing first and want to tell a story or put words out that affect people

I hate this narrow minded type of opinion. Some people read, some don't. I'm sure there's a lot of thing you don't do that others enjoy. Get your head outside of your bubble.

It’s not narrow-minded. It’s realistic, @BadassBusty.

I don’t care if people say they don’t read; I do care if someone says they’re a writer but they don’t read. It just isn’t possible.

If you want to write stories, then yes write stories. Be creative!

This might be interesting; I applied for both of OxBridge's Creative Writing master's degrees. Do have a look on their websites. They will not even consider you if you cant demonstrate a very broad range of reading. Wheen I went for my interview, instead of asking very much at all about my writing, the questions were based on my reading list, past and present.
Go figure!

TalentedMsRipley Did you get accepted on either of the courses?

It's commonly believed in the creative writing field and in publishing that you do not have the ability and creativity to write compelling literature uness you read widely too and any course you take will expect you to read a list of novels you might not have thought of trying.

Writing a book, any book, requires persistence, practice and hard work - think of it as a job because that's what it is. Many people think they can do it and most have to give up. OP if you want to write stories do so because you enjoy the experience of writing and not with the expectation of publication.

Oxbridge only wanting people who have read books they approve of is so fucking typical.