Recommended reading

[Gouki]

it was quite rare for me to read anything that didn't directly or indirectly involve my characters.

Same here though it wasn't always the case. When I first started play-by-post RPGs 15 years ago, I used to read other people's IC posts a lot in order to learn 1) how to format my own posts 2) see what were the most popular/best rated writing styles 3) what did people focus on in their posts.

As the years went by, I gradually began to read more books and less RPG posts. This was because a) I was growing sick of reading RPG threads that went inactive before the story was complete and b) I was looking for better quality sources of inspiration to improve my writing. (And what's better than a famous author's best selling novel?)

So then I stopped reading other people's works altogether and focused only on threads that I posted in whilst thinking of captivating scenes I'd recently read and how I could incorporate them into my own stories. (Not outright plagiarism, just borrowing vocabulary and sentence structures.)

These days I try to make an effort to read other people's stuff to get more involved in the communities I play with but if I've got 10 minutes to kill I'd still rather pick up a book than read someone's latest post.