READ LIKE A WRITER

READ FOR CONTENT

READ FOR UNDERSTANDING IDEAS

Reading and writing are inextricably intertwined, and literature like all cultur
al creation is an endless labyrinth of influence. And while some have argued tha
t writing well can be taught, our cultural narrative continues to perpetuate the
myth of God -given, inborn talent, or what Charles Eames has termed the gifted few co
ncept .
In Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Wa
nt to Write Them (public library), Francine Prose sets out to explore how writers
learn to do something that cannot be taught and lays out a roadmap to learning t
he art of writing not through some prescriptive, didactic methodology but by abs
orbing, digesting, and appropriating the very qualities that make great literatu
re great from Flannery O Connor s mastery of detail to George Eliot s exquisite charac
ter development to Philip Roth s magical sentence structure.
A work of art can start you thinking about some esthetic or philosophical pr
oblem, it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. But the r
elationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut. . . .
More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make
you want to write. It s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your ow
n room, trying out a few steps. I often think of learning to write by reading as
something like the way I first began to read. I had a few picture books I d memor
ized and pretended I could read, as a sort of party trick that I did repeatedly
for my parents, who were also pretending, in their case to be amused. I never kn
ew exactly when I crossed the line from pretending to actually being able, but t
hat was how it happened.
In the age of Fifty Shades of Grey, Prose offers a timely admonition against the
invasion of public opinion in the architecture of personal taste:
Part of a reader s job is to find out why certain writers endure. This may req
uire some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to ha
ve an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal let
s you see reading as something that might move or delight you. You will do yours
elf a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure
, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading
.
[ ]
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But
in fact it s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thi
ng that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly unde
rappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a comp
oser uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. . . . it s surprising how easily we
lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature
is crafted.
Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now
was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large a
nd small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer s sk
ill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our intere
st has everything to do with those choices.
Echoing Elizabeth Gilbert s conviction that grad school is detrimental to the spir
it of the writer, Prose reflects:
The only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was w
hen I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that m
y love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found i
t hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious sh
iver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teachin
g of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. T
hat was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, M
arxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students th
at they were reading texts in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had
actually written.
I left graduate school and became a writer.

from https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/31/how-to-read-like-a-writer/