Reading More When I Was Younger: A Selfish Time Travel Wish

Live and Impersonated, the novel I’m working so hard to get into the hands of my editor, is the first in a series of time travel novels. Writing time travel fiction continues to melt my brain. I find myself thinking even more often than normal, “If I’d only done this,” or “Imagine what life would be like if I hadn’t done that!”

Lately I’ve been thinking how much I would love to go back in time and make myself read more as a young person.

Writers Need to Be Readers

In books about the writing craft, in lectures, and podcast interviews, the advice I hear from almost every veteran of the trade is, “Read!” The consensus is that it’s hard to be a good writer if you haven’t exposed yourself to a lot of writing that’s already out there.

The only other advice I hear even more often from successful authors, editors, and publishers is to write a lot. Young Jonathan and some other inexperienced authors I know, would cling to this as something they can do. We’re passionate about writing!

But the epiphany I needed was, how can you productively write a lot if you don’t know what good writing is?

It’s like sending arrow after arrow into a field where you know there’s a target but purposely remaining blindfolded and saying, “Someday, I’ll hit that target!”

Maybe you could hit it by chance, but if you aren’t actually aiming or even looking after you loose an arrow, how will you know when you’ve succeeded?

If your mother squeals, will you know if it’s in joy or because you just drilled her with an arrow? Okay, that part of the analogy doesn’t quite work but it reminds me that we can also get caught in echo chambers. We read our own crap and think it’s lovely. Our mothers read our crap and gush. Then someday someone else reads our crap and calls it like it really is and we’re leveled.

Excuses, Excuses

It hasn’t gone away, incidentally. I noticed it happening to me repeatedly last night as I was finishing Orphan X by Greg Hurwitz.

Don’t you think that one way to improve reading speed might just be to read more??? Maybe just maybe? Ugh! I can say with confidence that my reading speed has continued to increase with each passing year.

If I could go back in time, I’d slap some glasses on that fool kid, shove a great book in his hands, and shackle him to a couch for a week.

As long as the chain is long enough to get to the kitchen and the bathroom, it kind of sounds like heaven to me.

Reading More Building Momentum

If I’d read more early on, I would have learned more about the written word.

I’d have a much-expanded vocabulary for one thing. During 2026, as of August 11, I’ve learned 61 new words. Some of them were words I recognized and had a hunch about what they meant, but wasn’t sure. Others were words like vise—it’s a 4-letter homonym I never discovered until yesterday! I wrote as though you could clamp something down in a vice…but that’s not the case really unless it involved leather straps or—okay, I’ll stop there.

So, I started looking up words when they gave me pause and started making a list of Words I’ve Learned. What’s a gaum? What’s the heck does capacious mean? I learned. It’s been fun.

But the real benefit of putting those words into my brain has been that now, when I encounter those words in future books, assuming my memory serves me well, I won’t have to puzzle out their meaning in context or lay down the book to open a dictionary. Without those speed bumps, I’ll read more words per session. I’m a young guy, but I still only have so many days in this life. The clock’s ticking and my to-read list on Goodreads isn’t getting shorter! If I can read more books in a month that’s huge!

I’m also learning so much about genre, voice, sentence structure, stylistic choices, tone, pacing, and countless other tools in the novelist’s tool belt that I would never have explored watching movies.

Author’s also say they don’t have enough time to read or that reading other people’s content will taint their creativity.

I’ll get to the creativity-tainting in a minute but time? Really? This is just a life skill. We have only so many hours in each of the limited number of days we discussed. But we all have that same number of limited hours. We make our choices, and again, if I could take a transdimensional being by the hand and have him walk me down the timeline to visit my earlier self who was too busy to read, I’d slap the videogame controller out of my young self’s hand and say, “Pick up a book, dummy!” You can’t get time back. Unless you want to make videogame design, writing, or development your career, what business do you have devoting hours on end to playing games.

That hurts to say because I love playing board games with my wife, family, and friends, but time goes where we tell it to go, and we can’t reap the rewards of reading if we don’t take the time to do it.

Reading Regrets

I will never be the reader or writer that I could have been if I’d been a better reader earlier in life.

I don’t worry about my creativity being tainted by the word works of others except that I do read books that are more likely to inform or hone the type of work that I’m doing.

For example, I’ve been encouraged by many people to read Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. Spicy romantasy is kind of a thing right now and I want to know what people are talking about, but I put it back on the shelf after a dozen pages or so because of some of the stylistic choices Yarros made in that book. I don’t want my brain to be in first person present right now, and I want to expose myself to more true science fiction. But I’ll get back to Fourth Wing. I can just about guarantee it. It sounds like a fascinating world with some complex character dynamics. It’s just not something I can devote reading hours to right now.

Please, if you’re a writer, be humble enough to expose yourself to the work of other authors who have done great things. Even if you don’t think their work is that great, read to learn why. I love this advice from author, editor, and book coach, John Mathew Fox: “Read Like a Writer, Not Like a Reader.” I’ve adopted his practice of always having a pen and paper handy while I’m reading so that I can jot down what I notice. In doing so, I hope to ingrain some of the genius and better habits into myself. With every book I read, I know I become that much better of an author.

If you know a writer who has made some of the same excuses that I have, please share this with them before it’s too late. Life follows art, they say, so maybe time machines will be a reality someday, but for now, we can’t time travel our way to being better readers. We can only start by getting off of the glass tit as Stephen King has called the television, and pick up a book today.