I have said repeatedly—and believe with all my heart—that you cannot be a good writer unless you are a good reader. A voracious reader, in fact. This is advice you’ll see again and again.

But before you start indulging yourself in that stack of Dan Brown thrillers or the box of Harlequin romances your mother-in-law gave you, there’s one more ground rule. You must read widely. Books, magazines, newspapers. You must read across all genres, fiction and nonfiction, history, science, sacred works, biography, memoir, poetry. You must read books that make you uncomfortable, books that make you think, books that make you cry or laugh, books that make you despair of ever writing that well. And you must read up: you must read literature, the very best of it. (Thus: not Dan Brown. Sorry, Dan.) You must learn to recognize quality writing when you see it—so you can emulate it.

This was stressed in a recent column from industry expert Jane Friedman, who said (about knowing what quality writing is),

If you can’t perceive the gap [between professional-quality writing and just-OK writing] you probably aren’t reading enough. How do you develop good taste? You read. How do you understand what quality work is? You read. What’s the best way to improve your skills aside from writing more? You read. You write, and you read, and you begin to close the gap between the quality you want to achieve, and the quality you can achieve. In short: You’ve got to produce a lot of crap before you can produce something publishable by traditional Big Six standards.

If you don’t know what great literature is or where to find it, have a look here:

• The books section of the New York Times online or any of the national papers (Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and so on).
• NPR Books always has interesting reviews.
• I like the book reviews at Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek.
• There is a lot of great book reviewing online. I’ve mentioned Maud Newton before, but you could also try Bookforum, Salon, or the Paris Review.

There are all sorts of lists out there, too, but you can drive yourself crazy trying to read things just so you can tick them off a list. Just wander; follow your interests and your instincts, but remember to read up. Authoring is an intellectual pursuit, and you need to pursue intellectuals. You need to read folks who write better than you do.

This is a sensitive subject. Writers tend to seek community with each other. They become friends, they read each others’ books. But what happens then is what publishing journalist Porter Anderson calls “the downside of community”:

These things are spread like viruses—writer to writer. Writers pass to each other the most wrong-headed ideas of spelling, grammar, and procedural myth (such as, “Sure, it’s fine to edit yourself”) like the commonest of colds. This can be a downside of community. It’s easy to pick up what’s just been done by a colleague and skip the step of checking an authoritative source, for yourself.

Friends, I see this all the time. I see the same words and phrases. (Don’t believe me? I’ve blogged about it before. Here too.) I see the same sentence structure, the same dangling participles. I see the same characters, for heavens’ sake!

Anderson is talking primarily about the misuse of words, but there are other problems, such as unconsciously imitating plot devices or characterization, or failing to see beyond the tropes of a particular genre. Some years ago an author demanded I sign a nondisclosure to work on a manuscript that ended up being so completely derivative of the Harry Potter series it was unpublishable. Trends—about magicians, say, or vampires—can stay around for a long time but only when newer authors build and expand on the themes rather than copying them.

But the main problem is simply the Perpetuation of Average. I recently heard a writing friend complain about a book she’d read; it was set in 1928, and a plot point hinged on a letter with an address that included a zip code. What bugs me about this is not that some readers will think the post office had zip codes in the ’20s, but that writer/readers who know better will assume a lower bar.

This is why I want you to read up. I don’t want your writing to sound like everybody’s else’s. To get noticed by readers, to create (dare I say it?) a best seller, your writing has to be great, not just good enough.

UPDATE: There’s more on this subject here.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”