[froggychairs]

What a fun question!

Obviously the answer is that its a non-question. The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success. Plenty of authors are voracious readers, others rarely pick up a book.

What do you see with a lot of creative authors (but not all) is a dedication to the craft. Putting in hours of writing. Often editing or just tossing everything.

I have noticed though. People on my team best capable of writing technical documentation. Read a lot of technical documentation. This is the exact domain GPT can Excel at, and one where generic language is accepted.

[pieix]

> The amount an author reads doesn’t correlate to success.

This is, in practice, not true — good writing doesn’t emerge spontaneously, it’s nurtured by reading other good writing. As Cormac McCarthy put it, "the ugly fact is books are made out of books."

[notahacker]

Nobody's saying reading other good writing doesn't help in any way, they're saying that quantity read doesn't particularly correlate with quality of output. I mean, I doubt Shakespeare read as much good quality English writing as the average human today, but the quality of his visual imagery and wordplay is generally considered to be on another level (and at the other end of the scale, his plots were heavily borrowed from the relatively small corpus of histories and dramas he was exposed to, whereas many writers far more widely read and educated in tropes and genre conventions resolved not to use them and came up with more imaginative settings and storylines... ). Many very well read people are competent enough in the use of language but will never write prose other people particularly want to read.