Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)

Writers are always trying to express their stories, their ideas, in ways that provoke thought and understanding. What do I accomplish with this book or short story? What does it mean to me or to the reader? To then read what someone else understood in your work can be disconcerting. Of course, any understanding not only depends on the sentence or phrase under consideration, but also on what comes before and after to flavor that understanding.

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose describes what she understands from portions of several works and what writers might learn from them in very specific instances. Many of her examples are from classic works that a good number of people would have read, have access to, or at least heard of. A well-read person might agree with her interpretations. The important thing here is that this was her understanding and what she learned as a writer.

For some people, whether they are writers or not, enjoying a work of fiction is more important than understanding how the author managed to tell about people and events using literary traditions. However, it is impossible for writers to read anything the same way once they have begun their own forays into the field. They find themselves asking "how did he do that" more and more often and reading for pleasure takes on a whole new meaning.

Prose demonstrates how to look at others' works in an analytical way that can also preserve the sense of awe the reader feels when indulging in the enjoyment of someone else's works. She also encourages us to read works we may have avoided, because we didn't know why they are generally so well regarded.

The best books, to my mind, are those which give rise to discussion and thought. Prose provides these in sweeping doses here.

Prose superbly evokes in this book, the need for the writer to read, and read widely, slowing down and carefully paying attention to the minutiae of the text. It is the focus on language: "lingering over every word, every phrase, every image, considering how it enhance[s] and contribute[s] to the story as a whole...[and by] reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly."

"Reading Like a Writer" encourages you slow down and absorb every word, sentence and paragraph. It also lets you ponder such things as: Narration, character, dialogue, and the details of text that makes literature dazzle.

Towards the end of the book, there is an insightful chapter on Learning from Chekhov, in which Prose suggests that we read his many stories, and by doing so "admit that you know nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world." This is sound advice, I think.

Finally, Prose details a list of Books to be Read Immediately. These range from Jane Austen, Raymond Carver, Tolstoy, Henry Green, Nabokov and Flaubert among others. These are books to be read and savoured, because we have to keep working at being better readers and writers, for we have an exciting apprenticeship ahead of us.

Prose does not talk down to the reader, rather she treats the reader as an intelligent person, who wants to learn a thing or two about how to read more effectively, so that they can aspire to write effectively.

Prose is a fantastic and witty communicator; her ideas are explained clearly and with passion. I highly recommend "Reading Like a Writer" to anyone that wants to be a greater reader, and indeed a quality writer.

While I am pleased to add Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer" to my how-to-write-good canon, I think I'd like her to do it over, not as a replacement, more as a corollary. Keep the title and most of the content; change the subtitle to "A PRACTICAL Guide for NEW Writers Aspiring to Make a Living in a Dysfunctional Industry". Ms. Prose has been at this game for so long and been successful for nearly as long that she has forgotten what it's like to be an FNG (effing new guy) to professional writing. She certainly hasn't experienced anything like being unknown and unpublished in the last 10 years where the barriers to entry have become even more entrenched than they ever were before.

So what to put in the new improved version? Besides an index, start with losing the references that were written before, say, 1960. It's obvious Ms. Prose loves the classics. So do I. Those writers were giants in their day. But it would be career suicide to try to write like them today, especially the overfed prose of the British writers. Today's writers have XBox, reality shows, and cellphone-texting standing by ready to steal the reader with the flick of a switch. Today's writers need to grab the reader quickly and not let go. That can't be done with 181-word sentences. This is the age of the short attention span. It is no accident that Harold Bloom has little regard for J.K. Rowling. Neither is it an accident that all the world is reading Rowling's work.

How to account for this phenomenon? Though Ms. Prose and I are nearly the same age, she has spent her life in literature while I spent mine first as an Army officer and later as an engineer. I've only been at this reading/writing game for about five years. Before you scoff, engineering and writing are more alike than they are different. Each is governed by a set of laws--grammar for writing, formulas for engineering. But beyond that there is a great deal of room for artistry, creativity, or, as we say in engineering, elegance. Were this not so, all bridges would either look alike or fall down.

Growing up in the world of words I can easily see how Ms. Prose fell in love with Words, Sentences and Paragraphs. She's become a virtuoso, rather like one of those violinists who delight in playing things that are hard to play whether or not they are nice to listen to. As for myself, I'm a Signal-to-Noise-Ratio kinda guy. In any given sentence, some words contribute to signal (meaning), while others contribute to noise. As I read Ms. Prose's windier sample passages, I observed two things: first I had to read them several times to grok their meaning--I had to grope for the subject-verb-object and was tempted to highlight them after I found them. Second, I never did settle into the rhythm of the words that she insisted was there. After five years, I can write a pretty good sentence, clever even. However, I suspect Ms. Prose and I go about it in very different ways and have very different outcomes. I think I'll pick up a copy of "Blue Angel" to see if I'm right.

Some other observations:

--Her chapters started out with decreasing granularity--words, sentences, paragraphs. I would have liked her to extend that progression to scenes and chapters as well. I suspect the sheer bulk prohibited that in this edition.

--A chapter I would have liked to have seen would have been one on openers. Every sentence has a mission--to get you to read the next sentence. Any sentence that fails in that mission leaves a long string of unrequited sentences. Hence, the nearer the failure occurs to the beginning of the book, the greater the damage. She did comment on a few people's openers, but I believe separate billing for openers would have been justified.

--I got a chuckle out of her closing section, Books to Be Read Immediately. She just got done convincing me to read more slowly, one word at a time. BTW--engineers do that by nature. Now she presents me with a single-spaced list of books that goes on for five pages. I had been wondering what I was going to do for the next twenty years--now I know.

--She commented that the joy of writing for her and many other writers comes from crafting sentences. I will admit that is one of the more fun parts of writing, but that is not why I write. I write to tell stories. Sentences--no matter how finely crafted--are only a means to that end. Beyond telling stories, I have the hidden agenda of changing people's attitudes--something you can only do with good fiction. I like to say that if you intend to inform the already convinced, write non-fiction. But if you would change people's attitudes, you must write fiction. Examples: Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (led to the Civil War), or Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" (led to the civil rights movement). You can write essay after essay on why it's wrong to be a racist but you will not change one racist mind. They do not respond to facts and logic. But let them live in a racist world, let them walk a mile in racist shoes, as you can only do in fiction--ah, now you may find a chink in their armor. Though racism is not my target, changing people's attitudes is why I write.

--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Knavish Piece of Work", Aarhus Publishing, 2006

I originally picked this book up because of an excerpt I caught about how the author read, and I thought, "wow, that kind of sounds like the [...] retentive way I read things!" I think the part that stuck with me the most was how Prose talked about how students read in some of the classes she taught. It was all about what the authors motives were instead of the words the author provided and the story. I suffered through this, especially with Kafka in World Literature a few years ago. The book breaks down quite a bit of literature I've never read. Plus side: I got more book recs! The other side: I was afraid I didn't get quite as much out of the examples as I could have if I had read the pieces beforehand.

This isn't a book that has a lot to do with writing directly and I don't think much to do with learning how to write as far as putting words down (that's best left to hard, manual labor of typing/writng). It's geared toward classics (and maybe a few contemporary pieces). If I hated reading book excerpts, I wouldn't have liked this at all. And the entire book is excerpts, where Prose takes pieces of various works to show how authors formatted things to flesh out a story. My favorite sections were "Close Reading," "Words," and "Narration" and all of these occur very early on in the book, which says it all. Other sections the examples given lost me. Prose complimented a sentence I read over ten times and couldn't understand, saying that "careful readers would have no problem understanding this."

I think that means I've met my match in close-reading. Hee.

I wish there had been nonfiction, too, since it was mentioned in the excerpt I read (I admit I skimmed many of the sections after awhile, so if there was some I could have missed them). But most of the books explicated are fiction. There's a lot of wanking of the "greats" here, which is sort of the biggest disappoint for me because I expected, "This is why I think this works." and not "This works because Author A is great at writing amazing sentences."

Overall, it wasn't a bad book and I enjoyed most of my time spent with it. I did take some good things away it, mostly consisting of how I think about sentences and structure, I just wish more of the sections could have been useful for me personally.

Ignore the negative reviews on this book. Clearly, anyone who skipped or skimmed this beautifully written book has no appreciation for the subtle grace of a well written sentence, paragraph, or novel. To the person who remarked something along the lines of "who needs to be told about the beauty of the last paragraph of Joyce's The Dead", I say that you apparently miss half of the joy of reading, which is sharing particularly gorgeous paragraphs or sentences with others. I frequently will call up my mother and father to share beautifully written sentences or paragraphs simply because they beg to be spoken aloud to another. The last paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or the account by Douglas Adams of the inspiration for the title of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" are two such luminous pieces of writing that I shared recently.

Her book has renewed my desire to read complicated, intellectual literature more slowly and with more attention to detail. I think that people forget how delicately and precisely literature is constructed - I know that I did! I am going to buy and read all of the books she quotes from; she has even inspired me to give Russian literature a second chance. She selects examples from a wide variety of fiction and even non fiction! I never saw the point of close reading the way it was presented in high school and college, it interfered with my enjoyment of the flow of the prose to have to constantly be marking down "biblical reference! Jesus?" and other inane comments. I wish I had read this book in high school, maybe the process would have been less painful and seemed more relevant. This book should be required reading for all college freshmen, regardless of their major.