If you want to tell stories, you have to get a sense of how they work and how certain choices affect the audience engaging with them.

Reading other works gives writers an invaluable look at how others put stories together and how we're affected by them. It's grounding.

It's also hard to build that experience, that innate sense of storytelling, any other way. Part of learning how to tell stories is engaging with stories themselves.

I wouldn't go so far to say you can't be a writer without reading, but I do think you miss a lot if you don't.

And if, for various reasons, reading books aren't your thing there are SO MANY other ways to engage with stories. It's really awesome!

There are audiobooks and TV shows and movies and YouTube channels and D&D actual-plays. There are endless ways to tell and hear stories.

I do think that it would be best to find stories in the medium you would like to tell them, but it's OK if that's too big a hill to climb for some reason.

Just engage with stories. Your own storytelling improves when you spend time with them. You can't help but learn.

All this to say that yeah, it can be really hard to sit down and read books, but...if you want to write them it really helps to learn what you love and don't love about the experience of reading.

You can learn how to create stories that work around those problems!

Or you can pick up tricks you'd never have thought of yourself. Learning from how other people approach your craft is a *huge* way to gain more tools for yourself.

And, since art is conversation, you can skew your story to add to what's buzzing around the culture.

In order to be a good conversationalist, you have to listen and absorb what the conversation is. It's the same with art.

You can't make your best points if you don't know how to sharpen them for the audience's ears. Art is engagement, and artists engage.