Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.
I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
