A darkened French class with a sea of pimple-faced high schoolers pretending they’re not texting—that’s where I adopted the biggest cop out of my young life.

We were watching Midnight in Paris, and a line from Corey Stoll’s Ernest Hemingway caught my attention:

“If it’s bad, I’ll hate it because I hate bad writing, and if it’s good, I’ll be envious and hate it all the more.”

In context, this line was Hemingway’s refusal to read the manuscript of Gil (Owen Wilson), but taken out of context by a young aspiring writer, it was an excuse to read less.

While it doesn’t seem to be an actual Hemingway quote—14-year-old me scoured the internet to quadruple check—the line resonated with me all the same; at last, I had validation for how I felt about reading at the time. Rife with the insecurities of an ambitious but unformed young writer, I had a complicated relationship with reading. Reading great writing filled me with feelings of inadequacy rather than inspiration or excitement as it had in prior years.

I loved reading as a kid. In fact, I think my love of reading preceded my love of writing—or at least they came in tandem—but somewhere along the way, reading became a chore.

I’ve been working to change that, to reconnect with my love of reading. The motivating factors behind this effort are numerous—the encouragement of friends, the pressure of my new Goodreads account, the understanding that my day job is literally to teach children to love reading—but above all, I want to improve my writing. How can I improve my writing if I don’t read? How can I write well if I don’t study the craft and see what works and what doesn’t in other books?

A few months ago, I started the habit of reading every night. A page, a hundred pages—it doesn’t matter as long as I pick up a book and read. And I’m happy to inform you, internet stranger, that I have consistently stuck to this habit, and now I find myself looking forward to that part of my day.

Success? Maybe.

Better yet, I can already see the positive impact on my writing. Two of my recent reads—The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto by Mitch Albom (which I picked up from Boston BookFest) and Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey—gave me some welcome inspiration for how to approach the experimental rewrite of my WIP. As a result, I seem to finally be picking up some momentum on that project after a few months of dreaded stagnation. Whether I’m back on track enough to meet my end-of-year goal remains to be seen, but in the meantime, I’ll take the wins as they come.

And for me, reading every night is a win.