To Write Better, Read Better.
Victoria Barrett
Digital Marketer | Exceptional Writer | AWS Cloud Practitioner | Ardent Storyteller | Strategic Thinker
If you look around, you can find plenty of productivity hacks for writing fast, gen AI most prominent among them. But here's the truth: there are no hacks for writing well. Great writing—yes, even content marketing writing—demands a facility with language that the average person doesn't have. Why? Because the average person doesn't read frequently enough, widely enough, or creatively enough.
You can learn enough subject material to become an expert in any area if you study. You can learn enough jargon to seem really smart in that area relatively easily. But being a SME isn't the same as being a great writer. If your expressive capacity exists only in a narrow lane, you're still not doing your best.
An expanded vocabulary and inventiveness with language across subjects will make your writing better; it will also make writing easier. Once you've grown your abilities, you won't have to ask, "How do I express this idea?" The questions of how falls away, leaving your full focus on the idea itself.
So, how do you get there? By reading, especially by reading outside your field and outside your usual habits. If you only read nonfiction or business books, for example, your command of metaphor and imagery will be weak. If you never read literary fiction, your ability to use language to connect to other people will be underdeveloped. If you never read narrative writing or poetry at all? Your imagination has probably atrophied.
Even so, I have good news for you: it's never too late to start. To help you kick off your reading practice, I've made a list of 10 books that will enrich your language, imagination, and empathy, helping you become a better writer, and possibly even a better person.
1. Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets, edited
by Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh
This collection of poetry is both accessible and widely variable. It's full of image-driven perceptions of human life, beautiful language, and poems that will make you see the world anew. My strongest recommendations are the poems by Tom Andrews and Carl Dennis, but you should read them all.
2. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
This novel about gamer kids who become successful game designers and navigate their lives and business together took the world by storm upon its release in 2022. If you somehow missed it, you're so lucky to get the chance to discover it now.
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
This Booker Prize winning novel from 2008 is a challenging read and fairly hard on the heart, but the lushness and beauty of its language and richness of its characters provide more than enough reward for engaging with its upsetting plot.
4. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson
This collection of reported essays is vivid—sometimes graphic—and takes a deep dive into every subject it approaches. Johnson's characteristically poetic language is put into the service of thoughtful examinations of issues and events both domestic and international.
5. Normal People by Sally Rooney
Okay, if you are a person who reads books, you've probably read this one, or at least seen the Hulu adaptation. But if you're not, or if you've dismissed it because it's about young people in love and you don't think you'll be interested, give it another look. The accessible but elegant language tells an essential story about how we become the people we are.
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6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
You could read anything by Joan Didion and instantly make better sentences. This National Book Award winning memoir also asks you to engage with the most human of experiences: grief. Didion's meditation on her husband's death and its aftermath is, for me, the one essential volume of her work, though her entire output is well worth your time.
7. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Like The God of Small Things, this book is a bit hard on the soul, but entirely worth it. Marra gives readers a deeply human, if harrowing, picture of resistance to oppression in language that is somehow gorgeous even as it describes the most difficult imaginable events and circumstances.
8. White Noise by Don DeLillo
Perhaps you were assigned to read this evisceration of consumer culture, with its sendup of middle-aged fear of mortality, in college. Now that you're a bit more grown up, give it another look, and see how it shows you your own life anew.
9. Runaway by Alice Munro
If you only ever read one short story writer, it should be Canadian legend Alice Munro, and if you only ever read one Alice Munro book, it should be Runaway.
10. The Trouble with Testosterone by Robert Sapolsky
These essays about science and humanity don't seem like much of a study in language at first, but when you consider the way Sapolsky translates the most complex possible topics and into everyday conversation, you begin to notice the linguistic genius on display.