Tageszeitung - Daily Newspaper

I read an awfully small amount for someone who wants one day to make it as a writer. Getting a daily newspaper should be the solution to increasing my textual intake, but I always seem to avoid it. I’ll pick up a copy of The Guardian if a long train journey beckons, but end up reading only the front and back covers as it‘s still folded over, as there just isn’t enough space to open out fully - doing so would just irritate my fellow sardines and I’d feel like a prick. I’m also not a very fast reader, which is probably the main reason I don’t actively look forward to sitting down with a magazine or novel. Somebody once bought me a speed-reading book, which, as bogus and contrived as this sounds, I gave up on because it was taking too long! Is it possible to be a good writer without a huge literary knowledge bank to call upon? I could argue my writing is less tainted by the works of others and is therefore far purer in nature than that of my peers. But that would sound like pretentious, arrogant twatty-twaddle, so I won’t be doing that. Reading should be far easier than writing, but for me it’s just such a chore.