When you get the advice to “read more” to get better at writing, it’s not very concise and really sounds unhelpful after the third time you’ve heard it. So here, this is what you’re getting out of it (besides grammar or whatever):
- You observe the way a story is organized and how it achieves its flow
- You become familiar with tropes and archetypes
- Story structure becomes an easy to recall memory, and every novel you’ve ever read becomes a reference book
- You develop how you write stylistically, the things you hate and the things you try to emulate
- You gain the skills to critique books in a smart manner, and therefore can recognize flaws in your own works that you remember bashing a novel for