The Exact Rule, in King's Words
The rule appears in the "On Writing" section of King's 2000 memoir, framed as the one piece of advice he is most certain about. "If you want to be a writer," he writes, "you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." The pairing is deliberate: King does not separate the reader from the writer, because in his view they are the same person doing two halves of one job. He returns to the point with a sharper, more confrontational version — "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." For King, claiming you want to write while not finding time to read is a contradiction in terms.
Why Reading Comes First
King's reasoning is that reading is the only way to absorb the thousands of small craft decisions that make prose work — pacing, dialogue, paragraphing, where to cut. None of that, he argues, can be taught as efficiently as it can be caught from immersion in other writers' books. "Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons," he writes, "and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones." A clumsy novel demonstrates exactly what to avoid; a brilliant one expands your sense of what is possible. This is why King reads overwhelmingly fiction and why he refuses to be snobbish about what he reads. The point is not to study consciously but to soak in the craft until it becomes instinct.
How King Actually Does It: 70-80 Books a Year
The rule would be hollow if King did not live it, and he does — at remarkable scale. "I'm a slow reader," he admits in On Writing, "but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction." That self-description as a slow reader is the most encouraging detail in the whole book for ordinary readers: the volume is not a product of speed but of relentless daily habit. He fits the reading into the cracks of his schedule, carrying a book everywhere and reading "in small sips as well as in long swallows." The number also includes audiobooks; King estimates six to a dozen of his yearly books are listened to. The takeaway is that "read a lot" is achievable for almost anyone who treats reading as a daily, portable habit.
Read Bad Books on Purpose
One of King's most counterintuitive points is that aspiring writers should not read only the classics. "The good writing teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling," he writes — but bad writing teaches faster in one specific way: it shows you, unmistakably, what failure looks like. Reading a leaden thriller or a tin-eared romance is a kind of negative tutorial, immunizing you against the same mistakes in your own work. This is why King's seventy-or-eighty-book diet is not a curated highbrow list but a wide, omnivorous sweep across quality levels. He treats his entire reading life as one long, ongoing workshop in what does and does not work on the page.
Applying King's Rule to Your Own Reading
King's advice translates into a concrete practice for anyone, writer or not. First, commit to reading every day, even in small amounts — consistency beats intensity, as his "slow reader" pace proves. Second, always have a book on hand, in print or audio, so idle minutes become reading minutes. Third, read across quality and genre rather than only "important" books, since variety sharpens judgment fastest. Fourth, accept that you will not retain every word — King's goal is immersion and calibration, not memorization of each sentence. The deeper lesson is that input drives output: the more and the more widely you read, the better and faster you understand everything else you read and write.