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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31913
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I will start my answer from a slightly different angle than the question originally proposed. You are asking whether or not you _should_ write a novel, and specify the purpose as writing a book with a good reception by the book-reading community, so I will start off by answering the question _"Will I be able to write a novel that will be well-received by the book-reading community without reading a lot of other novels?"_

The answer to that question is most likely no, at least at first. **Writing is a craft** , and reading other books can help you understand how others do it. But the most important activity in learning any craft is conscious training. If you start writing your novel now, you will most likely not be satisfied by the result yourself, the same would be true for an editor. (There are books with terrible style out there which got published for their interesting stories alone, but they are a minority.)

However, you will identify a lot of problems in writing the story. You might notice that you do not understand how to properly open dialogues without being awkward, or how and when to weave in world desciptions, or how to build in plot twists and hide them from the reader, or any number of other problems that a proficient writer might be able to solve.

Now when you have identified these problems, you will be able to identify the solutions to them in other novels more easily. You will be able to **learn from others more consciously** , so after you have tried writing a novel yourself, you will be able to learn how to write from others a lot faster.

If you look at it from a more general perspective, you should practice your craft, but you should also look around and see the work of others. If you aimed to be a mason, you might want to just start by building a wall and see what results you can up with, realize the structural weaknesses of the wall and then turn to look at the techniques that others came up with. Others might learn better by watching a wall being built by masters and then trying to imitate them. There are different ways of learning, and you will have to apply your **individual way of learning**.

Of course writing is also an art, and finding your own style is important, but the underlying techniques can be learned from others.

I believe that you should **start writing if you want to become a good writer** , and not be discouraged by not so great first results. But you should also **try to understand how others achieved what you are trying to achieve** , and read other novels.

Original score: 7