Illiterate Writers

The reason so much online fiction sucks!

I’m going full dad here (as opposed to full “R-Word”). But the newbies, both young and older, need to read this message.

There’s a growing problem in the fiction writing world. It’s one that rarely gets talked about directly. Hell, perhaps I’m the one who discovered it. I call it the rise of the illiterate writer. And no, I don’t mean people who can’t read. I mean people who don’t read.

Too many new writers, especially in online communities, are trying to write fiction without actually reading fiction. I suspect they consume stories primarily through television, movies, video games, and the occasional comic or graphic novel. These writers may know story structure in a basic, beat-driven way. They’ve absorbed archetypes and genre tropes. But they haven’t learned how fiction writing actually works. They don’t study sentences. They don’t live inside paragraphs. They don’t know what a well-written book feels like, or even looks like on the printed page.

The results are glaring. These writers often churn out work bloated with clichés. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’ve encountered genre through parody and satire rather than its direct, foundational texts. They mimic echoes of echoes. It’s Die Hard as a video game cutscene pretending to be a novel. They’ve never read Chandler or Hammett or Highsmith, but they’ve seen enough riffs and spoofs to think they know noir. The depth is gone, and all that remains are thin sketches and stale one-liners. It’s a bunch of kids writing about sultry dames and and sharp fedoras when they should be writing about tattooed chicks and baseball caps.

Worse, these illiterate writers often lack the essential tools of prose fiction. Foreshadowing becomes clunky or nonexistent. Character interiority is shallow, because they’ve only experienced characters externally. They’ve consumed it through visuals, voice acting, and cinematic shortcuts. Their prose is often flat, riddled with weak grammar and clumsy syntax, because they’ve never spent hours reading and subconsciously absorbing how real authors build a sentence.

The writing craft, like any other creative endeavor, begins with mimicry. Every serious writer goes through a copycat phase. You don’t start original. You start by unconsciously, or even consciously, stealing from the masters. You learn what rhythm feels like by reading Elmore Leonard. You see how tension is built by reading James M. Cain You discover voice by soaking in Bukowski and Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy. But if you don’t read, you’re skipping this vital stage. And, guess what? It shows.

You cannot become even a mildly competent fiction writer without being a voracious reader. You must read until your eyes liquify and leak from their sockets, and then you keep going by reading a hundred Braille books with your fingertips. Reading is not optional. It’s the cost of entry. There are no shortcuts, no hacks, no YouTube breakdowns that replace the long apprenticeship of reading actual novels. Fiction writing is not screenwriting. It’s not a movie pitch. It’s not a Twitch stream with dialogue. It’s a literary form. And to master it, you have to study it at the source.

The future of fiction depends on readers who write, not content creators who dabble in prose between Netflix binges.