Does reading always improve creative writing?

[southbucks3]

She seems to struggle sorting her ideas out on her head and is a master of totally incoherent sentences and stories filled with irrelevant detail ending with "they all went home to bed" or "it was all just a dream" - good job she's a great mathematician!

Hey don't knock it...remember Dallas...she could be a multi millionaire script writer by this time next year.

[yoyo123]

She seems to struggle sorting her ideas out on her head and is a master of totally incoherent sentences and stories filled with irrelevant detail ending with "they all went home to bed" or "it was all just a dream" - good job she's a great mathematician!

Hey don't knock it...remember Dallas...she could be a multi millionaire script writer by this time next year.

[push-pull-mum]

She seems to struggle sorting her ideas out on her head and is a master of totally incoherent sentences and stories filled with irrelevant detail ending with "they all went home to bed" or "it was all just a dream" - good job she's a great mathematician!

That sounds so like my DS. He is a self taught reader (picking out words as soon as he could talk and reading fluently at 3) and always has at least 2 or 3 books "on the go" but his creative writing is dreadful. I know all the ideas are there in his head but he doesn't join things up for the reader and assumes they will just "get" what he is saying - and then he drops the story in mid air or ends with something completely nonsensical when he gets bored of it.

So you're telling me that a good selective school will not cure this, pist ...? I suspected as much

[southbucks3]

So you're telling me that a good selective school will not cure this, pist ...? I suspected as much

Nope...nor will it cure them of swapping tense every third sentence, I find the only cure for this is rolling up the English or history book they have just written the codswallop into, and beating them with it. He thinks it is funny...I don't, it drives me bonkers!

[Yamin151]

Big readers here. One will write beautiful poems and got to final 2000 of 500 words comp last year (out of 72000), so very creative and sure it's the reading. Brother more into drawing the maps like you get in the fantasy books he favours.

[pist]

Ahh yes, tense swapping. We have that one too! Maybe I'll try bashing harder next time. Could be where I've been going wrong all this time