In April did the Avon Bard appear,
    and in that self-same month did he depart
whilst sun shone bright with ever-fulsome sneer
    and Springtime dallied chill as boggler's art.
Today, we halt anon and dream awhile
    to make our vulgar speeches simular,
frail trump'ries though they prove to be, and smile
    in epilogue to his craft insular.
Thus, here below, presented in array,
    art twenty iterations tender-writ
that if poor William wert alive today,
    he would belike have penned of his own wit.

Many people think the secret to writing is – logically enough – writing. The same mantra gets repeated over and over and over: Sit down and write. You don't have to brainstorm, you don't have to outline, you don't even have to think about what you are going to write. Just write.

That's actually pretty good advice. But it's incomplete. There's another extremely important aspect to writing that sometimes gets overlooked.

Reading.

One of the writing instructions I've always taken with a molecule of NaCl is to never use adverbs. I constantly see this advice in the various writing blogs I follow, most recently in a Men with Pens post by Chris Banks titled 5 Common Mistakes that Even Great Writers Make. On adverbs, Banks offers this advice:

So, yesterday my harddrive crashed. I don't mean hold-the-power-down-and-reboot crashed: I mean erase-reformat-and-reinstall-the-operating-system crashed.

I got a rejection email for a story I submitted to an English magazine in August. It's a very short story – about 400 words, a so-called "flash fiction" piece – that has an extremely unusual twist in the last paragraph. It's (delightfully, in my humble opinion) strange and thought-provoking, and everyone who has read it so far has given me wildly different interpretations. After reading it, one guy gave me brief lecture about a word in my title and its relation to the mechanical structure of a refrigerator; one woman thought it was about necrophilia before she read the clinching paragraph.