Is “yes” a valid answer to the above?
To those who asked, the show is in sort of an interview/talk show format, but there’s a great deal of interactive text-based chat going on with the listeners during the program in which there is more than enough content to keep discussion going.
Most writers start out as readers who one day think, “I could do that too”. Not every reader becomes a writer, just like not every fan of art becomes an artist, but some do. Perhaps many have read Redwall or Watership Down, or even something like Warriors or Animorphs.
Maybe a good approach would be to contrast the two. Art can portray details and “capture a moment” better than the written word could ever hope to. But writing can convey a series of events, character motivations, and change over time in ways that one or a handful of images could never hope to, though these can be achieved in serial art formats such as comics, graphic novels, and animation, and these media require both the story-crafting skills of a writer and the visual portrayal skills of an artist.
In the furry fandom, one thing both writing and art have in common is that there is a lot of crap out there and you have to do a little digging and sorting through it to find the good stuff, though with writing it may take more effort. And maybe beginning writers have more of a tendency than beginning artists to think their work is better than it is, but I’d tell those writers to write anyway, because the only way to get better is to practice and keep doing it. And if you just want to read, there are plenty of really good authors in the fandom, and if you don’t know who they are, talk to any of the publishers in the dealer’s room at most larger furry conventions. If you tell them what you like they’ll be glad to tell you what they have that fits the description. But there’s a long list of classic and SFF literature from mainstream publishers that qualify as furry, much of it predating the existence of furry fandom as we know it.
If something thinks reading is boring drudgery, I’d ask if they have ever once read something that made them forget that and want to keep reading, because you can’t wait to find out what happens next or because you care about what happens to the characters or the world where it happens is full of interesting surprises.
Maybe another angle to bring up - one big thing in the fandom nowadays that I simply don’t get is adoptables, as it seems to me one of the most personal and enjoyable things you could do as a furry fan is to create your fursona. But maybe that’s just my writer thinking at work, since as writers we have to create dozens if not hundreds of characters to populate our stories and as such we’re very much in tune with things like describing our characters (both physically and behaviourally) and how they are changed by events.
One last thought I’ll throw out - a good suggestion to any artist who isn’t sure what to draw is to read a few stories, and when they find one that captivates them, draw something from it. It’s probably a good idea to check with the author first, but 98% of authors would be okay with it, and in fact most of them would be thrilled to have someone drawing pictures of their story. By the way, that goes both ways - I’ve seen stories that were inspired by works of art.