Reading Like a Writer: Educating Yourself on Craft

READING LIKE A WRITER MEANS ANALYZING WHAT WRITERS DO TO CREATE THE BOOKS YOU LOVE

If you don’t read, don’t expect to write anything worthwhile. The act of reading is fundamental to good writing, for it allows you to experience what writing is all about—the structure, the story, the truths told in the lies, the aphorisms, the scenes, the descriptions, in short, all the elements of fiction. And if you’re a writer, it helps you understand (if you put the effort into reading like a writer) how to achieve what your favorite writers achieve. I think it was Norman Mailer (though I’m not sure if I’m correct here) that said he didn’t have time to read because he was always writing. But we’re not all Norman Mailers, are we? We’re writers working on our craft, and part of that work requires reading other writers, in particular writers who know what they’re doing.

Reading like a writer means we pay attention to the techniques and choices writers make during the process of writing their short stories or novels or novellas (or whatever form you’re reading). It means studying and understanding how writers construct that “it” factor, the composition of words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters (if they include chapters, of course), that pull the reader in, that keep the reader reading, and that, with any luck, provide a pleasurable and compelling experience where the reader enjoys either the story, the characters, the plot, the descriptions, the scenes, the dialogue, but, hopefully, all of those things combined into a whole that the reader enjoys. Reading like a writer sometimes kills the enjoyment of a novel for me, but if you’ve been doing this for as long as I have, I’m able to set my fiction education aside and put my book lover hat on to enjoy the escape from reality. (I’m also not that fun to be around when watching movies, as I often know what’s going to happen based on what a writer would do).

Reading Like a Writer: Educating Yourself on Craft explains how and why it's critical to understand what's out there in order to use those things to improve your own writing.

The great William Faulkner compares reading to a carpenter’s apprenticeship, encouraging writers to analyze both good and bad work. Stephen King emphasizes that reading is a mandatory tool for writing. A.L. Kennedy, who has written a lot of fiction and nonfiction (including one of my favorite books, On Bullfighting, advises reading broadly and deeply to absorb good writing. And Francine Prose, who I met in grad school at the University of Tampa, says, “If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.” This from Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Everything each and every one of these writers says is completely true. And, let’s be honest, everything they say is common sense.

The craft of writing is just that—a craft. And crafts, be they sculpting, photography, metal work, painting, or whatever, require putting in the time and effort to understand not only the basics of that craft but how to work towards becoming an expert in that craft. For me, the path I took was through formal education. My bachelor’s degree was in English Literature. My master’s degree was in Literature in English. My Master of Fine Arts was in Creative Writing, specifically fiction. Prior to, and during this time, I was writing short stories and poems and working on novels. And I was reading incessantly. Part of the degree requirements for the degrees I received were reading texts—novels, short stories, nonfiction (in particular critical works), flash fiction, you name it. I read mostly literary fiction and works considered classics and many that were “in the canon.” And when I say “part” of the degree requirements, I mean about ninety percent of the requirements. The rest of the time I was writing papers, taking exams, and participating in workshops and other activities meant to improve my understanding of literature, how authors write (and wrote in different centuries), how these authors created their “worlds,” built themes like love, war, politics, class, and so on, the style(s) they chose to write in (for example, Hemingway changed the style of 20^th-century literature by replacing the ornate, descriptive language of the 19^th century with his minimalist prose, and his Iceberg Theory, which basically states that only 1/8^th of the writing should be shown by the writer while 7/8ths of the story should be felt by the reader through subtext, meaning, emotion, and so on, as well as sticking to the concrete rather than the abstract), and other factors intrinsic to “good writing,” whatever that means.

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For the average student of literature (rather than the writer), the approach of understanding a piece of writing is similar to how a writer might approach a work, but the interests are slightly (maybe extremely) different. When I was pursuing my MA in Literature in English, I had a class that was comprised of graduate students pursuing the MA degree so they could teach. As assistant professors in colleges/universities. As English teachers in high school, and junior high school, and elementary school. Not me. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but my focus at the time was not applying to creative writing graduate schools but to graduate programs that focused on literature. I wanted to know what made good literature literature, plus I was already writing, so why do both in one program? I learned later that MFA programs in creative writing were for other things. Networking. Meeting famous writers. Building community. And yes, writing and mentorship, but that just wasn’t anything I knew before applying to MFA programs. Either way, the idea of reading like a writer, especially after having Francine Prose (hell of a name for a writer, isn’t it?) came to our program to talk about her book, which is the sort of peak of the subject.

“If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.”

--Francine Prose

Anyway, I was the only creative writer in that class in grad school. So, naturally, our perspectives were different. I remember a specific day where we’d read some text (I can’t remember which one it was), and my take on the text was 180 degrees different than the rest of the class. They were all looking at the writing from a critical perspective. I was looking at the text from a creative writing perspective. While they were looking at “what” the writer was writing about, I was viewing it through the lens of the writer. Yes. We agreed on the themes in the text. We understood the dialogue, the settings, the plot, and so on. But my point dealt more with the creative process of the writer and how she got to where she got, and they were focused on their interpretation of what the writer was “trying to say.” Now, I’m not saying they were wrong and I was right. Rather, I felt my insight into what the writer’s motivations were for writing her text were closer to the truth of what the writer was doing, why they were doing it, how they did it, and so on. My classmates were focused on “interpretations,” as I mentioned, only they were coming at it from a place of never having written fiction. It’s like describing how a person learns to ride a bicycle rather than actually knowing how to, and going through the experience of, rid(ing) a bicycle. Sure, you can give an accurate description, but you’re never going to feel the wind in your hair, understand that magically free feeling that overcomes you when you’re able to get to places you’d never get to by walking (especially when you’re a kid), what it feels like to fix a flat, and so on.

I ended up in a heated exchange with everyone in that class. Except the professor. Why? Because the professor, as most professors do, write. They may not write fiction, but they write books and papers as part of their jobs. So do students, but they write shorter works so that they can hand them in, take a position, and meet the requirements set forth by the directors of said graduate. literature programs.

I remember it very clearly (though, of course, time alters the true events of the past in the way memoir does). Everyone was on the offensive, me included, but I was laughing at how vehement my classmates were that I didn’t really understand the way they did what the author was trying to achieve. Our professor, a sort of hip (I know, I’m showing my age) guy, democratically explained why he understood my perspective while no one else in the classroom did. It’s because, he told them, he (meaning me) has not only read like a writer, he has created like a writer as well. He knows what the writer had to do to write what she’s written, and how she got there. He understands, above and beyond the themes and what a piece of dialogue or scene or whatever is intended to do, how the author got there, at least with a little more understanding than someone just reading a text that is then open to criticism. To return to the bicycle thing, I know how to ride a bicycle; you only know how to describe it. And you’re going to miss things like the smell of petrichor or the sweet smell of the dead raccoon you encounter when passing one on the bike trail. You’re going to not realize the fear that overcomes you when you almost get hit by the car when trying to cross the street on the bike rather than walking it across at the crosswalk. You’re going to miss hauling ass and wrecking and scraping half your body and getting raspberries that’ll not heal for weeks from the crash. You miss these things by not riding that bike. Same with writing. Same with reading like a writer rather than reading like a writer AND being a writer. It’s just not the same.

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So, dear fellow writers, pick up a book. Pick up your favorite book. And read a passage here or there and figure out what that writer did to pull the emotions from you that make you ask questions. That impress you. That you wish to write. When I wrote my novel, THE LOSSES, I had a copy of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge beside me. I’d read a passage I liked, and then I’d get to writing. I’m doing the same right now with a novel I’ve already written a first draft of. On my desk are copies of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and Small Mercies. I love what Lehane does when it comes to scene, dialogue (his dialogue is incredible), plot, and his ability to pull you along into the seedier parts of Boston (where most of his books have been set as he’s from there and understands the place—the people, the history, the way they speak—better than most anyone). It goes back to the old “good writers borrow, great writers steal” adage. Am I stealing anything from Lehane? Yes and no. For me, I get inspiration from what Lehane does in his novels. I get the skeleton of what he’s doing—the voice, the ethnic diaspora (in my case my novel takes place in Miami, where I was born and mostly grew up, and so there’s Caribbean and Latin American influences there), the seedier parts of the place(s) I grew up in and frequented, the historical events going on while I was there (think Cocaine Cowboys and violence), and like that. You won’t read my novel and think, “this is Dennis Lehane.” What you will think, if I’m successful, is that I’ve created a voice, captured the ethnic diaspora (think Spanglish), incorporated historical events that affect those times (the late ‘80s and early ‘90s), and, hopefully, pulled off the dialogue of the time, and so on. That’s reading like a writer. It’s breaking down what is (at least in your opinion), the things that work in a piece of literature, and understanding it. Or at least believing you understand it from a more firsthand perspective than if you don’t put the effort into taking that next step, which is immersing yourself into the act of writing.

So, read like a writer, especially if you’re writing. When you first start out, I’d recommend copying a story or a whole novel. What that’ll do is give you the feel of what that writer had to do to create what they’ve created. You’ll obviously not be going through all the drafts that writer had to write through to get there, but you’ll know what it takes, at least partially. And that, in my opinion, is the greatest way to get you on to that next step: writing the book you want to read, and that, with any luck, others will want to read as well.

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. Need help from a holistic/substantive perspective editing your novel? Shoot me an email at Cully@novelmasterclass.com to get you on the right path to completing your novel.

“Short story writer Perlman debuts his first novel, a beautifully written, complex intergenerational drama that examines the ways family relationships shift when trust is broken.” - Kirkus Reviews

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