Tricky Tuesdays: Reading While Writing

What's crackalackin', homeskillets?
(Hmm... that isn't a very good opening, either. I need to work on my catchphrases...)

Today, I'll be talking about reading while writing--but I'll actually be talking about balance, influence, and voice. Reading the work of others influences us while we're writing, but is this necessarily a bad thing?

One of the first how-tos I read as a teenager warned against reading while writing. You see, writers are sponges. We soak up the world around us. I know of writers who work in silence, believing any music they listen to will mess up their pacing. But is reading really so dangerous?

If a writer is a sponge, what good are we without things to soak up? We'll dry out and stiffen--we might even stink after a little while. The hardest part of writing for me is finding my voice. The style in which we write has to be born from somewhere! As an artist, I can say that I learned to draw by emulating artists much more talented than me. Eventually, I found my own style.
Reading is the same way. By reading, our words can find voices.
Reading while writing benefits us in many ways. We learn how to strengthen our sentences. We discover new techniques for describing people and worlds. We find the bricks needed to build clever metaphors. We learn what kind of characters we love and despise, and what about them works and what doesn't. We can learn pacing from other writers, we can learn flow. We can find our voice.
Whenever I feel as if my writing has dried up, I read a book. Any book, really: a How-To, a Non Fiction, a YA. The creative juices flow through me when I'm done, and I feel ready for writing!