Should I stop reading while I'm writing my own book?

This fear is so real. It’s a constant worry that the media you consume will bleed into the art you create, and that worry can often stop you from doing things that a) you enjoy, and b) actually improve your ability to create.

I’m a full-time writer, and I spend all my time immersed in the world of books and stories, and as a ghostwriter, a lot of what I do is actively mimicking the words of others. I’ve spent a lot of time learning the difference between my work voice and my personal voice. Being freelance, I also find that I never stop working. Every piece of narrative art or media I consume for pleasure, I always think about in terms of craft. This has put me in a good position to be able to spot the differences between inspiration and mimicry in my own work, but also to spot the shared inspiration points in the works of others. 

When you learn to spot it, you learn that there are no completely new ideas. Every idea is built on the wealth of human knowledge that came before it. No matter how novel or unique something may seem, there was something that inspired it, and sometimes those inspiration points can be easy to spot, but mostly, they’re not. So as long as you’re not actively plagiarising or stealing the work from someone else, there is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from the art you consume and letting it filter into your own creation. It’s your voice that makes your work unique, not just the ideas behind it.

Don’t overthink it

It’s easy to feel like you need to immerse yourself in your own work, but this is exactly how you remove both the fun from the process and also become more prone to writer’s block. 

As writers, everything is inspiration, not just books, but things happening in life, news stories, film, television, video games, or even just a beautiful piece of art you’ve seen. Cutting reading from your life is only removing a small source of inspiration, but also an important piece of your growth as a writer. 

A lot of the worry about letting other ideas feed into your work comes from the ill-informed online discussions about “idea theft” that permeate all of social media. People will talk about tropes as if they invented them or that no one else can use them, or talk about their plotlines as if they’re completely unique. In reality, tropes are tropes for a reason (hence why they’re called tropes in the first place), and most plots will follow similar beats within their genres. 

You could give five different writers the exact same plot outline and ask them to write a novel based on it. What you’d end up with is five completely different books. Because the way a writer interprets an idea and puts it to the page is what makes a book, not the idea or the inspiration itself.

Inspiration, not plagiarism

Every writer is in conversation with everything they've read, whether or not they notice it happening. Our minds take in material and turn it into something new and unique to us. There is nothing wrong with taking influence and inspiration from what you’re reading, so long as you don’t cross the line into outright plagiarism.

Plagiarism is intentional. It’s taking something unique about a work and copying it into your own: the particular words, sentence structure, sequence of images or beats used to convey an idea. Even if you swap out synonyms or rearrange a few details, if what you've reproduced is someone else's specific way of saying or shaping a thing, that's copying, because the writing you're presenting as yours (finding that phrasing, structure, or arrangement) was actually someone else's.

Inspiration is when you transplant an idea into your own work, but stripped of its original expression. A theme, a structural device, a type of character, a feeling you want to recreate, an approach to a problem: something abstract enough that it has to pass back through your own imagination and come out again in your own words, using your own images, choices, and style. The work of expressing it is therefore entirely yours, even though the seed of it came from somewhere else.

Don’t stop reading

Abstaining from books as a way to protect your voice is actually doing the opposite. You’re cutting yourself from one of the most important parts of improving your craft, because there is so much you can learn from other writers!

Exposing yourself to the work of others will help you pick up craft mechanics you haven't even consciously noticed. When you read widely, you absorb things like pacing, how tension gets built and released, how dialogue carries subtext, or how a chapter ends on a hook. Removing that from your process, means you limit yourself only to your current skills, rather than letting yourself grow and expand as you consume more knowledge.

Reading also expands your sense of what's possible, both tonally and structurally. Writers will often bend the “rules”, letting you see what’s possible when you subvert expectation. You need to let yourself be exposed to different rhythms, different relationships between the narrator and readers, and different voices so you can really start to find your own.

But for me, most importantly, reading a lot recalibrates your ear for what's actually good versus what merely feels good in the moment of writing it. It's very easy to fall in love with your own writing, but being immersed in other people's prose gives you an external standard to measure your own work against. The result will be better writing, an easier time of self-editing, and stronger drafts once you’re ready for revision.

Still worried? Read with intention

I know it’s not easy to get out of your own head if you’re genuinely worried about plagiarism. The one thing I really don’t recommend is not reading at all, so if you’re still not comfortable just doing your normal reading for pleasure, here are a few things you can try to get you back into the habit, or to make you feel more comfortable:

• Read outside your own genre for a while. If I’m too immersed in a single genre I’m writing, I’ll often try and do my reading for pleasure in a completely different one. I learn a lot from a different style, but there’s also no chance of anything being transplanted from what I’m reading into my own work directly.
• Keep notes as you read. If something genuinely sparks an idea, write it down on purpose rather than letting it drift about in your head without context. Half of what ends up in my note never makes it into anything I’m writing, but if it does, I can always have a reference to what about it inspired me, rather than accidentally recreating it because I’m trying so hard to remember it.
• Don’t worry about too much overlap in your first draft. You’re very unlikely to copy something from what you’re reading exactly, but first drafts are literally there for trying things out. Let yourself catch these things in editing, rather than placing a reading ban on yourself. Often the distance between when you first read something and when you write your second draft is enough to break yourself out of that immediate inspiration and let you look at it with fresh eyes.

Influence isn’t a dirty word

You're not doing anything wrong by letting books influence you. That's what reading is for a writer. What you've been calling contamination is just a healthy imagination taking inspiration from the things you love, and that’s perfectly normal. It’s your voice and execution that make your work unique, not just the things that inspired it.