Great work, you’re 10 years ahead of me when I realised I hadn’t lived enough to be a writer ;)

You got some excellent advice below — live your life, enjoy your moments, drink in experience — and yeah, read. Read broadly and read deeply. Your experiences can be held up and examined against those of the writers you’ve read. Here is what Egypt was like to this person in 1851. Here is what it is like to me today. Those connections are the ones that will give your stories resonance and power, be they fiction or poetry, creative nonfiction or deeply intimate memoir.

It’s a short life. Reading lets us pack in a bit more than we might’ve been able to otherwise.