Writers' Bloc

Humans acclimate themselves to the tastes of food. If you eat lots of delicately balanced and exquisitely cooked meals, you will begin to distinguish subtle tastes, textures, and flavours in these dishes. If you chomp down at McDonald’s every week, you’ll dull your senses of taste with poorly prepared meals.

Likewise, readers and writers acclimate to the literature they surround themselves with. If you expose yourself to a great breadth of literary works - historical, modernist; sci-fi, realist, post-modern - from a wide range of authors, you’ll begin to detect the discreet uses of grammar, of plot construction, of narrative devices that may seem invisible to most. If the extent of your literary consumption is a few episodes of CSI and that one favouritenoveleveromg, you’ll be depriving yourself of the differentiation involved in acquiring taste. 

And while “acquiring taste” might sound a bit lofty and pompous, think of it this way: would you want a politician to govern you if they were not well read on matters of politics and law? Would you want a doctor to cut your body open without having dedicated a healthy portion of their life to studying how to cut you open without killing you? No, that’s silly. On the same note, would you be a skilled writer or reader if you were not well read in a wide array of literary stylings? Answer: no. 

You grow with every book that you read. So read constantly, and read diversely.