Do I read like a writer?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

As I've begun to revive my interest in fiction writing, one of the things that I have begun to analyze more closely is how I read other people's writing, specifically fiction.

This might sound weird at first. "What does how I read have to do with how I write?" Our boy Stevie King always said that the only way that you could be a good writer was to read a lot and write a lot. But how does the way that you read affect how you write? I'll try to explain this concept as I understand it, or at least how I would define it.

In the photo I included with this post is a book by Jeff Shaara, one of the writers I got interested in several years back. I'd seen the film Gettysburg on TV, then decided to check out his dad Michael Shaara's book that the film was based on, The Killer Angels. From there, I learned his son was writing a ton of historical fiction books, and I've been reading them ever since. Jeff Shaara does historical fiction, almost all of them based on p…