Stories can be...

Reading is to writing what inhaling is to exhaling. They’re not the same but they are part of the same process; one must recede and co-exist with the other. Reading can do more than almost anything else to help your writing. Almost anything else. Finally, to learn to write, you will have to write and write some more, then do some more writing.

----Gene Olson, Sweet Agony: A Writing Manual of Sorts, p. 109