On the down side, I think we are becoming a world where people find it hard to be stimulated by their own imaginations – we receive sounds and images already conceived for us all the time, instead of doing it ourselves.

Reading requires the reader to imagine. So does writing. For some reason I can’t explain, we are dropping one form of stimulation (reading), yet upping our interest in another more challenging form – writing, which requires imagination plus creation. Perhaps that says something about our world…we need creativity more than we need a more passive mental stimulation?

Most of the bios I have read of popular writers have had one thing in common: they have all started in childhood with a love of reading and eventually writing their own stories.

However, I think as the non-reading writer progresses from wanting to write ‘for fun’ to ‘wanting to get published’, reading becomes a greater necessity. Here, I agree with all points you make.

Having been a non-reading writer for a bit, I sympathise with the other side. With a full-time job and three kids under six, I simply hadn’t the peace and quiet to read. I chose to spend my time in other ways. I wrote a bit for fun.

Now I’m getting more serious and I know that reading is important. It’s enjoyable, too… if you have the time.

The second is that the entertainment media (TV, radio, newspapers, movies, theatre, music industry, internet etc.) already bombard us with a huge amount of stuff, even if we don’t get the time to sit down and read books; but for the average person wanting to respond with their own thoughts and ideas, writing (a book, a blog, whatever) is perhaps the most readily accessible means of communication. We may not have the skills or resources to make movies, for example, or express ourselves through material arts like painting and sculpture, but just sitting down and writing is (as you say) easily within our reach. In such cases it is perhaps not so much about wanting to enter a particular literary circle or genre, but more like the readiest way to respond to the barrage of ideas from a whole variety of sources.

Also we have had the saying for many years that everyone has at least one book inside them that they could write; so perhaps it is not so much the urge to write that is new, but having the means available to do so.