I live to write and believe good writing does not "just happen" magically. Writing requires regular practice and work. If someone is writing constipated, he needs to write crap to fertilize what is to come. Fiction is a shift for me given that my previous spate as an author was in the field of educational research (about writing). While reading does indeed improve writing, I do not buy the notion that to be a good write one has to be a voracious reader. Instead, to be a good writer one must be a voracious writer who drafts, edits, revises, and rewrites with dogged pursuit.