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    Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
    Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
    Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
    Ebook305 pages5 hours

    Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

    By Francine Prose

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    About this ebook

    A distinguished novelist and critic inspires readers and writers with this inside look at how the professionals read—and write

    Long before there were creative writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

    As she takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—Prose discovers why these writers endure. She takes pleasure in the signature elements of such outsatanding writers as Philip Roth, Isaac Babel, John Le Carré, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. Throughout, she cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

    Editor's Note

    A great teacher…

    Covering gesture, characterization, narration, and dialogue, Prose shows you how to get the most out of your reading — and how to apply those lessons to that manuscript shoved in the back of your desk drawer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061751899
    Author

    Francine Prose

    Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

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    Reviews for Reading Like a Writer

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    • 4/5
      Great excerpts. This left me wanting to read more, and with a list of books to move to the top of the pile.

      Mission accomplished, I'd say.
    • 5/5
      This was an amazing guide to reading more critically, expansively, delicately, and memorably. I was very impressed by this book. There were countless examples of what Prose denoted and her explanations were extremely insightful and well-thought out. She is obviously quite talented at writing and I almost felt that the entire book served as a course in literature. This one is not to be missed for aspiring writers, or people who wish to read literature more clearly and with more cognizance.5 stars- full marks!
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this. Would be a good tool to expand discussion in book group.
    • 4/5
      Francine Prose's book is a great guidebook for the literary tourist, a thorough and engaging reminder to actually look at the ways in which what you're reading has been constructed - to look at each word, sentence, and paragraph so as to understand what is and isn't said, what it tells you, and why. Along the way, she introduces you to countless authors you have and haven't heard of, giving you just enough of a taste that you want to read them all. (Well. I don't want to read Pynchon or Flaubert or Nabokov again, but I can see where you'd feel like you might.)She addresses, sort of obliquely, the question of whether writing workshops and classes are "worth it" and whether there are rules of construction that can be taught or imparted or imbibed, and comes to the conclusion that the rules are really more like guidelines, and that there as many good reasons to break the rules as to follow them.The examples in the text form the basis of a great reading list, and following the book is a list - containing some books from which Prose has taken examples, and others that she has not - which is also excellent. She has a definite taste for the old masters, and for Russian lit, but more importantly she has excellent taste in literature, and an excellent eye for how writers do what they do. I disagreed with some of her analyses, but I really enjoyed the book, and highly recommend it to readers and writers alike.
    • 4/5
      Reading Like a Writer is a quite enjoyable read, chock full of good advice and even better examples. I appreciated Prose's distaste for universal rules and principles, and her "show don't tell" method of demonstrating what makes for good writing. All in all, this book just made me feel excited to read more, and made me feel equipped to appreciate what I read more deeply. So I guess it achieved its aim fairly well.I did wish, however, that Prose also included some examples of writing gone wrong, alongside her countless examples of writing done well. Admittedly, she is explicit about wanting to avoid this (saying that aspiring writers get enough negative criticism as it is in workshops), but it seemed to me that she could've made some of her points more effectively (or that I would've understood them better, at least) with the aid of some contrastive evidence.Still, this book is a stirring testament to what good writing can be and accomplish. (Plus, it's a goldmine of recommended reading.) Though probably not a book that every passionate reader need own, it is at least a book that every passionate should borrow and eventually read.
    • 5/5
      Love it. It's one of the important texts for creative writers.
    • 4/5
      Prose's only real advice (wisely) is to read slowly. Only then can we properly understand good literature. She seeds our efforts with a great many of superb writing.
    • 5/5
      Reading Like a Writer is a description of writing. It focuses on the use of the word in literature, and makes excellent use of examples for well-known books to illustrate her points. Francine Prose describes the strengths of her selected passages and why the wording is important. The book is aimed at improving the readers ability to appreciate good literature. She discusses the nuances of word use, picking at the meaning of individual words, and what is not said and why that is important. She talks about the use of paragraphs, and how changing the paragraphing changes meaning of text. She shows how to derive meaning from what isn't stated in the text, and makes me appreciate the effort that a quality writer goes to to get the words right. After reading this work, I feel I have a new respect for literature. I'm eager to try to tackle some of the books she's recommended.
    • 5/5
      I picked up this book because the book's title describes one of my life's goals: to write a book someday (hopefully). I still don't think I'm ready to reach that goal, but this book helped me to start reading books in a different light.Sometimes I think I am the world's worst reader of literature. I tend to read everything literally rather than think of any themes, metaphors or analogies. I enjoy reading for plot, characters, dialogue but skip over the construction of the writing, what the author is trying to say by how they construct their prose. Francine Prose's book tries to teach someone like me, to read between the lines, and to analyze what makes great writing, great.Prose argues that one does not need classes or "how-to" books to learn how to write. She advocates that the best lesson for writing is close reading the work of great writers. Reading like a Writer basically excerpts famous works, and then Prose discusses how each passage shows great technique to construct sentences, character, tone, narration, dialogue, gestures, etc. Prose even includes a chapter on Checkov to show how he "breaks" all the previous rules.As a result of my background, I sometimes found it tough to do the close reading. I am a fast reader and tend to race through books to "find out what happens next". But for once, I really took my time to go through the passages and I do think it's influenced how I read. I'll admit, I still don't understand some of the points Prose tries to make (especially the paragraph section), but I feel I'm closer to understanding than I was before. Maybe I'm just thanking my lucky stars that someone actually tried to explain close reading; all my English lit classes all the way into University never did (and I did well in them!)Reading like a Writer was a NYTimes Bestseller, and it's easy to see why. Prose has a love of books and the written language, and her writing is very accessible. The passages she chose were from a very diverse group of writers and she even includes a list of "Books to be Read Immediately" that I will try to make a must-read for me in the next few years. Definitely Recommended.
    • 5/5
      I found this book in the Literary Criticism section of the bookstore. Yes, it belongs there: this is a book on how to read books. But this book also belongs in the writing section because this is a book on how to read books in order to improve your own writing. Francine Prose organizes this book as one might organize a how-to-write book, starting with a close look at word choice, then widening her focus in each succeeding chapter: sentences, paragraphs, narration, and so on. In each chapter, she draws on classic works of fiction to illustrate her point: examining the choice of individual adverbs with Katherine Mansfield's short stories, admiring a paragraph-long sentence by Virginia Woolf, noting how Chekhov's short stories always seemed to echo a point in a writing class she was teaching. Prose's love of good writing shines through this book and most readers will find it contagious, enjoying new insights into classical works even if they never feel like writing themselves.
    • 4/5
      It's certainly very beautifully written, and Prose has a lot of good advice and examples. Sometimes she gets tiresome, especially when she starts quoting extremely long passages or goes on and on about Chekhov. But other than that, she's pretty cool. And her advice IS good.
    • 3/5
      Don't read this book the way I did -- cover to cover out of general interest. The structure of the chapters are all the same: topic is presented, briefly discussed, then many good examples by famous authors are presented, often through long quotations. As a reader, this was tedious.

      Instead, I think this book could be useful to a novice writer as a reference when they are struggling with a particular concept. In such situation, they can read the corresponding chapter to get some pointers and be exposed to a variety of strong examples. For a writer, this might be helpful.

      The author sets up her exposition as if she is going to share some very important guidelines for writers. Aside from the fact that she acknowledges (in the final chapters) that anytime she gives a Do or Don't to her students she finds an effective example to prove her wrong, she doesn't give guidelines. She gives examples. Take out the quotations from this book and you have an extended newspaper feature article. Boiled right down, her thesis is "read good writing" and proceeds to give you examples of what you should be reading. At least, she does organize the samples to say "this is a good example of ____." I wish she would have closed her examples better; they're almost all intro heavy and exit light (or non-existant). Articulating what specifically was so good about the passage was not a strength. Though perhaps that is her point -- you can't nail down what makes writing good. Yet she has a whole book trying to tell you what good writing is.

      In summary, this is a decent reference book for consultations as needed, but not a read-through kind of book.
    • 3/5
      This is a hard book to review and rate because I have such conflicting thoughts about the content. On one hand, it did make me really think about structure, dialogue, and gestures of my novel. On the other hand, I feel like I learned nothing concrete--just that I should carefully think about those things, which is kind of frustrating.Overall I'd give it a 3.5. Worth the read definitely, if not for the prod into deeper thinking about the smallest things in your novel.
    • 5/5
      This book caught my eye recently mostly because the cover of the book states that it is like a long love letter to reading. This statement really intrigued me and I have to admit that I wanted to start reading this book immediately. I am so glad that I bought this book and began to read it because I really learned a lot of writing, and reading from its pages. Francine Prose discusses a lot of important points in her books about how to be a great writer by being a great reader at the same time. She stresses how to focus on every word, sentence and paragraph because each word or phrase is deliberately chosen by the author to convey their message. Another wonderful point she mentions is that there are no rules in literature and by reading literature we can define how some writers are able to successfully bend these “unspoken” rules. She emphasizes her argumentative points by choosing examples of literature, short stories and poetry to convey to her audience the importance of reading every word. These short blurbs of literature and short stories really made my wishlist of books to read grow by leaps and bounds. She also stresses how literature can been seen as an endless source of courage and confirmation to writers and readers and it an idea I have always found in my own life. Her humor and wit shine throughout the book and she inspired me to focus on every word I read and slow my pace when I am reading a book. I even want to go back to the books that I have loved so long and read every word again and focus on all the things that I learned from this book. This book is a wonderful and inspiring companion for any writer or reader and I plan returning to it often when I find myself rushing through a good book.
    • 3/5
      An author of fiction, and more illuminatingly, a teacher of writing and fiction, explains her approach to reading literature as a study of how to construct sentences, paragraphs and character. Pleasant to read, persuasive, but mostly like a seminar paper in english literature. She is interested mainly in relationships and character, does not address conveying plot or action. There are long passages from other writers in the book, and some personal remembrances, and it feels like it was summarized from lectures. I don’t know if I would want to be the kind of writer she admires, I would rather tell a straightforward story than allow for the dense critical analysis of my word choice and characterization.
    • 5/5
      I love reading, but I am not a creative writer. How to Read Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, by Francine Prose, intrigued me when I saw it on the shelf in my local library, so I took it home and read it. After I finished, I promptly bought my own copy. This was a book I knew I would treasure and consult often, not to read it from cover to cover again, but to mine it repeatedly for what it reveals about how fine literature is crafted. If you love any art form, it always helps to understand more about the craft behind it. That’s what this book did for me. Francine Prose must be a remarkable teacher. I’d love to experience her classes in person. Reading this book felt like I was sitting through a top-notch course on creative writing. I’ve always wanted to know more about the process of creative writing, but I was always too intimidated to try a creative writing course. Now, if I’d ever seen a course entitled “How to Read like a Writer,” I’d have knocked down the door to try to get in. But I didn’t have to, and you don’t have to either. Prose has transformed all her best lessons on teaching literature by example into this thoroughly enjoyable and accessible guide. She has packed it with probably close to two hundred examples taken from what must be a rich lifetime worth of reading literature closely. The author deftly explicates each example so the hidden craft is exposed. Thank you Francine Prose! This was exactly what I wanted. I recommend it highly to other avid readers of literary classics and modern literary fiction—lovers of the art of using language well; this book will most assuredly improve your overall reading experience.
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderful book. Ms. Prose, an aptly named writer, writing/lit instructor and critic, shares some of her favorite passages from novels and stories to highlight techniques for using words, narrative, character, gesture etc. And she's not shy about her worship of Chekhov (guess I should read him). Very enjoyable to read, it provides great information without being the least bit pedantic or boring. She even provides a list of "Books to Be Read Immediately," from which many of the passages are taken. This is a woman who is truly in love with fiction. I'll be referring back to this often.
    • 3/5
      This book is an oxymoron, a paradox for me - I like it and I hate it; what I like about it I hate and what I hate about it I like. My favourite chapters are the first chapter and the last two chapters. I enjoyed "Learning from Chekhov" the most.
    • 3/5
      more a memoir than a book on writingworth reading only after you "shared" the same readings that the author lists within a) an appendix b) the book itselfotherwise, it is just rambling and asking you to take for granted what the author decided to be relevant: a faith-based reading :)
    • 5/5
      This is a book where as soon as I got to the end I wanted to go straight back to the beginning again. It's no use borrowing it from the library and giving it back (says she who's done just that); this is a book that you need to own, to read and re-read over and over and over again, and to cover with pencil notes in the margin and copious underlining.This book is so good IT NEEDS CAPITAL SHOUTY LETTERS. It's a phenomenal read, whether you're a wannabe writer or simply an avid reader who's interested in learning more about what makes a great book great. Examining all aspects of writing from words to narration to dialogue and gestures, Prose ultimately concludes that there are no fixed rules to great writing, but very different, well-executed strategies and observances which we can learn best through quality reading.For example, we learn how Heinrich von Kleist used little or no physical descriptions of his characters in his writing, yet they leap vividly in our imagination. He defines his characters by their actions, whereas Jane Austen by contrast defines hers through their thinking. Two very different writing strategies, both extremely effective.I warn you that this book, should you choose to read it, will do your wish list no good at all. Many, many pieces of narrative from a wide variety of amazing authors are used to exemplify the various writing points being made, and they were all amazing. I was disappointed that I didn't get to read on to the next part of the story with all of them, and it was a fantastic introduction to many authors I hadn't heard of before, as well as other greats which I just haven't got to yet.If you write fiction, this book needs to be within grabbing distance for your next bout of writer's block.5 stars - meticulously researched and well explained, you'll read in a whole new way after reading this book.
    • 4/5
      Rush, rush, rush. When it comes to reading and the enjoyment of literature, the maxim we're taught is to read more and to read faster. Rejecting that rushed approach, Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer argues that it's better to slow down and pay attention. To linger and savor, not just mindlessly consume.I read a lot and I'll be the first to admit that sometimes the only way to read the massive amount of new literary work being published every month, the classics on my bucket list, and the literary darlings from previous years is to read fast. But I try to make amends. If I've read too quickly, I'll often re-read. Favorites get read a few times. There are even some books I'll re-read every year religiously (why buy books if not to re-read them and enjoy them again and again?). Usually I'll find that I gain some new insight with each re-reading. Or that life experience and age filters it differently; something that moved me in a certain way at twenty-two moves me in another way in my mid-thirties. But I try not to skim because even judicious skimming ultimately makes the reading experience a hollow one. Like stuffing your face at the buffet bar and not really tasting anything.Prose warns against skimming and rightfully so. “Skimming will not allow you to extract one fraction of what a writer’s words can teach us about how to use the language.” Very true. (Um, so why did our professors in college assign massive, difficult tomes to be read in a week's time? Skimming was, ironically, a survival skill we learned as English undergrads.) As fiction readers, our interface with the books we read is mainly through the plot (what happens) and through the characters (who's involved), but we often miss the more subtle cues of storytelling by glossing over the words, sentences, and paragraphs. Bottom-line, you miss a lot by reading quickly or not reading mindfully. Because even if you're just in it for the story, Prose's point is that the story—all the psychological truths and crucial revelations—also exists in the microcosms: the words used, the sentence structure, or the gestures of the characters as they speak. The story is in the details.We forget that writers often labor painstakingly over a sentence or paragraph for days. Books are the result of multiple drafts. Good writing is never accidental; it's earnestly deliberate. There are effects and subtexts the writer wants to convey—even if we're not consciously aware of them—through the way something is written. In other words, it's not just what is said or written but *how*. Prose advocates for this kind of scrutiny and close reading. Books deserve more than our fleeting attention. She wants us to look at writing in the way we might walk up to a painting to peer at each brushstroke.The idea of close reading might turn a lot of people off but to Prose's credit she makes the process a delightful one. (I wish I had read this as an undergrad!) Taking passages from various works, Prose breaks down what each writer does and achieves, closely examining the language used and how it expresses mood, character, and themes. You'll never look at these works the same way again.Overall, Reading Like a Writer is must-read for any serious reader (and writer).
    • 3/5
      Prose shows us all her favorite passages from a lifetime of good reading. It was a lovely trip and it took me places I would not have thought to go. I especially liked Prose's thoughts on writing, how good writing often breaks the conventional rules of good writing.
    • 3/5
      Prose’s love of classical literature is clear throughout the pages of this well-written and informative guide; as the front cover blurb from USA Today put it, this book is a “love letter to the pleasures of reading.”However, it’s also elitist and takes several superior swipes at genre fiction. In her exhortations to readers who want to be writers, Prose does make a compelling case for learning to write by reading classical literature … and reading it slowly, word by word. Her list of “books to be read immediately” combined with the excerpts she included as her examples has added a considerable number of “must-reads” to my already teetering “to –read” pile.While reading Prose’s well-written guide to writers, I was struck with a sense of someone yearning for a bygone era – an era in which life was slower and more easy-paced, and readers had the leisure time to sit and read 1000- page tomes slowly. For that reason, I found much of the admittedly good advice contained in this book could not apply to me as either a reader or a writer.
    • 4/5
      GoodFrancine Prose is an author who starts this book questioning if “creative writing can be taught” and concluding, as a teacher of creative writing, that it cannot. How to improve your writing can be taught but the love of story and the creative inspiration cannot. However the book does attempt to address the second part of writing, improving the craft. The chapters are “words”, “Sentences”, “Paragraphs”, “Narrative”, “Dialogue”, “learning from Chekov” and “Detail” which give you some idea of her approach. Throughout she is a passionate advocate of reading and liberally intersperses her points with quotes (sometimes very long quotes that last several pages) from her favourite writings. Overall – Recommended for anyone interested in the craft of writing
    • 5/5
      "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them" really was eye-opening for me. I've been a reader practically all my life. The family story goes that I taught myself, but that was too long ago for me to remember how that happened or if it's true. But, like most of us, our education emphasized first *how* to read and memorizing new vocabulary words, then later unfortunately teachers dutifully discussing "classics" without much enthusiasm. In college, I was a science major so I missed out on classes that discussed great literature or classes on writing. One of my biggest regrets in life, really. Especially when I remember that as a kid I wanted to be "an author" when I grew up. Author Francine Prose has helped make up for this void that I, and others, have experienced. She emphasizes being a careful, and slower, reader so as to fully appreciate nuanced meanings. Of course, not all books (i.e. Harlequin romances) require, or need, such close reading, and some books are intended to be true page-turners -- but Prose feels that reading with care makes for a better reader. I myself am guilty of being a fast reader, and I am sure that this trait has made it difficult for me to appreciate several good books over the years that I've tried to approach them. Prose includes several excerpts and an intensive reading list (in the back of the book), and discusses different components of story, in chapters such as "Words", "Character", "Dialogue", "Details". These chapters are for readers and writers, both; they do not make one or the other audience feel left out. She also includes a chapter on Chekhov -- obviously, she is a great fan of him and other Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Nabokov. She even decries graduate students who have never read Dostoyevsky. Her thinking is that if one wants to be a good writer, one must read truly good writers as well, and understand what it is that makes them great. This advice seems to be obvious, actually; but I do agree that not all writers are good or wide-ranging readers. Prose concludes "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" (p. 268). That final sentence summarizes very well her purpose of this book. My edition has a very good section at the end that includes a conversation (Q and A) with Francine Prose. I enjoyed that a great deal, also.There is no index, which is disappointing -- if one wants to recall a certain work or author discussed, it can't be looked up. One has to thumb through the book instead.
    • 3/5
      Really smart about reading and writing. Also lots of GREAT recommendations on books to read. Multiples times I'd read a lengthy excerpt that she quoted for illustration and would have to add that to my reading list, so impressed was I by just that short bit.
    • 5/5
      I want to be a writer, but I'm still really not much good at writing. This book is perfect for me. Prose (what a delicious name!) takes you on a journey through the components of what makes a good book so good, from the right choice of words, to the structure of the sentence, all the way through to narrative and dialogue. It is a genius piece of writing in itself, as well as quoting from a feast of classics (both modern and classical). I will keep it close by next time I try to write something.
    • 4/5
      Informative and relevant to serious writers.
    • 4/5
      Normally I don't much care for "how to write better" books. I don't find them to be very useful; I think if you want to learn how to write better fiction you're better off reading a lot of very well-written novels. However I found Prose's book quite useful, because in addition to her giving advice on such things as dialogue, characters, etc., she includes many excerpts from very good novels and explains what the writer did right. Most of the books she quoted from I haven't read myself, and I found myself wanting to. Although Reading Like a Writer took me awhile to get through, I think it was worthwhile. It's one of the few "how to write better" books I can recommend wholeheartedly to amateur fiction writers.
    • 3/5
      Prose is very good at connecting the big dots. That is, she does a good job at finding great examples of technique, character development, etc. That's where I really found some value in this book, it added some new titles to my "to be read" list that I'm very excited about. If you've ever taken Creative Writing 101 or Journalsim Reporting 101, Prose's concepts will be more of a review (but with GREAT examples) and not much else. But if you like good writing for writing's sake, then this book will whet your appetite for some of the more classic books you may not have read.

    Book preview

    Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose

    READING Like a WRITER

    A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

    FRANCINE PROSE

    This book is dedicated to my teachers:

    Monroe Engel, Alberta Magzanian, and Phil Schwartz.

    CONTENTS

    ONE: Close Reading

    TWO:Words

    THREE: Sentences

    FOUR: Paragraphs

    FIVE: Narration

    SIX: Character

    SEVEN: Dialogue

    EIGHT: Details

    NINE: Gesture

    TEN: Learning from Chekhov

    ELEVEN: Reading for Courage

    Books to Be Read Immediately

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Books by Francine Prose

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    ONE

    Close Reading

    CAN CREATIVE WRITING BE TAUGHT?

    It’s a reasonable question, but no matter how often I’ve been asked, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can’t be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.

    What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years. What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’d spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time? Probably, I should just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.

    Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I took. This was in the 1970s, during my brief career as a graduate student in medieval English literature, when I was allowed the indulgence of taking one fiction class. Its generous teacher showed me, among other things, how to line edit my work. For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, or especially cut is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

    Meanwhile, my classmates were providing me with my first real audience. In that prehistory, before mass photocopying enabled students to distribute manuscripts in advance, we read our work aloud. That year, I was beginning what would become my first novel. And what made an important difference to me was the attention I felt in the room as the others listened. I was encouraged by their eagerness to hear more.

    That’s the experience I describe, the answer I give people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.

    But that class, as helpful as it was, was not where I learned to write.

    LIKE most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books.

    Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

    Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal, methodical way—Harry Crews has described taking apart a Graham Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered, how Greene handled pacing, tone, and point of view—the truth is this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis. After I’ve written an essay in which I’ve quoted at length from great writers, so that I’ve had to copy out long passages of their work, I’ve noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent.

    In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls putting every word on trial for its life: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.

    I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made. And though it’s impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.

    This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught. What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire. And so the book that follows represents an effort to recall my own education as a novelist and to help the passionate reader and would-be writer understand how a writer reads.

    WHEN I was a high school junior, our English teacher assigned us to write a term paper on the theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. We were supposed to go through the two tragedies and circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness, and vision, then draw some conclusion on which we would base our final essay.

    It all seemed so dull, so mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it. Without this tedious, time-consuming exercise, all of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas.

    Still, we liked our English teacher, we wanted to please him. And searching for every relevant word turned out to have an enjoyable treasure hunt aspect, a Where’s Waldo detective thrill. Once we started looking for eyes, we found them everywhere, glinting at us, winking from every page.

    Long before the blinding of Oedipus and Gloucester, the language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations. It asked us to consider what it meant to be clear-sighted or obtuse, shortsighted or prescient, to heed the signs and warnings, to see or deny what was right in front of one’s eyes. Teiresias, Oedipus, Goneril, Kent—all of them could be defined by the sincerity or falseness with which they mused or ranted on the subject of literal or metaphorical blindness.

    It was fun to trace those patterns and to make those connections. It was like cracking a code that the playwright had embedded in the text, a riddle that existed just for me to decipher. I felt as if I were engaged in some intimate communication with the writer, as if the ghosts of Sophocles and Shakespeare had been waiting patiently all those centuries for a bookish sixteen-year-old to come along and find them.

    I believed that I was learning to read in a whole new way. But this was only partly true. Because in fact I was merely relearning to read in an old way that I had learned, and forgotten.

    We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, means that we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, that we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting because it is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.

    The more we read, the more rapidly we are able to perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning. The more we read, the more we comprehend, the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a particular book.

    At first, the thrill of our own brand-new expertise is all we ask or expect from Dick and Jane. But soon we begin to ask what else those marks on the page can give us. We begin to want information, entertainment, invention, even truth and beauty. We concentrate, we skim, we skip words, put down the book and daydream, start over, and reread. We finish a book and return to it years later to see what we might have missed, or the ways in which time and age have affected our understanding.

    As a child, I was drawn to the works of the great escapist children’s writers. I liked trading my familiar world for the London of the four children whose nanny parachuted into their lives with her umbrella and who turned the most routine shopping trip into a magical outing. I would gladly have followed the White Rabbit down into the rabbit hole and had tea with the Mad Hatter. I loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door, a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.

    Children love the imagination, with its kaleidoscopic possibilities and its protest against the way that children are always being told exactly what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and what’s illusion. Perhaps my taste in reading had something to do with the limitations I was discovering, day by day: the brick walls of time and space, science and probability, to say nothing of whatever messages I was picking up from the culture. I liked novels with plucky heroines like Pippi Longstocking, the astringent Jane Eyre, and the daughters in Little Women, girls whose resourcefulness and intelligence don’t automatically exclude them from the pleasures of male attention.

    Each word of these novels was a yellow brick in the road to Oz. There were chapters I read and reread so as to repeat the dependable, out-of-body sensation of being somewhere else. I read addictively, constantly. On one family vacation, my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon. I borrowed stacks of books from the public library: novels, biographies, history, anything that looked even remotely engaging.

    Along with preadolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there: Gone With the Wind, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, fat bestsellers by James Michener, with a dash of history sprinkled in to cool down the steamy love scenes between the Hawaiian girls and the missionaries, the geishas and the GIs. I also appreciated these books for the often misleading nuggets of information they provided about sex in that innocent era, the 1950s. I turned the pages of these page-turners as rapidly as I could. Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

    I was fortunate to have good teachers, friends who were also readers. The books I read became more challenging, better written, more substantial: Steinbeck, Camus, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Salinger, Anne Frank. Little beatniks, my friends and I were passionate fans of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We read Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and the proto-hippie classics by Herman Hesse, Carlos Castaneda: Mary Poppins for people who thought they’d outgrown the flying nanny. I must have been vaguely aware of the power of language, but only dimly, and only as it applied to whatever effect the book was having on me.

    AND then all that changed with every mark I made on the pages of King Lear and Oedipus Rex. I still have my old copy of Sophocles, heavily underlined, covered with sweet, embarrassing notes-to-self (irony? recognition of fate?) written in my rounded, heartbreakingly neat schoolgirl print. Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

    Focusing on language proved to be a practical skill, useful the way sight-reading with ease can come in handy for a musician. My high school English teacher had only recently graduated from a college where his own English professors taught what was called New Criticism, a school of thought that favored reading what was on the page with only passing reference to the biography of the writer or the period in which the text was written. Luckily for me, that approach to literature was still in fashion when I graduated and went on to college. At my university there was a well-known professor and critic whose belief in close reading trickled down and influenced the entire humanities program. In French class, we spent an hour each Friday afternoon working our way from The Song of Roland to Sartre, paragraph by paragraph, focusing on small sections for what was called the explication de texte.

    Of course, there were many occasions on which I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote, ten days for War and Peace, courses designed to produce college graduates who could say they’d read the classics. By then I knew enough to regret reading those books that way. And I promised myself that I would revisit them as soon as I could give them the time and attention they deserved.

    THE only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading texts in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written.

    I left graduate school and became a writer. I wrote my first novel in India, in Bombay, where I read as omnivorously as I had as a child, rereading the classics I borrowed from the old-fashioned, musty, beautiful university library that seemed to have acquired almost nothing written after 1920. Afraid of running out of books, I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French.

    Reading a masterpiece in a language for which you need a dictionary is in itself a course in reading word by word. And as I puzzled out the gorgeous, labyrinthine sentences, I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.

    A work of art can start you thinking about some esthetic or philosophical problem, it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. But the relationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut, and in fact my first novel could hardly have been less Proustian.

    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 own 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 memorized 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 knew exactly when I crossed the line from pretending to actually being able, but that was how it happened.

    Not long ago, a friend told me that her students had complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter. I’ve also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I’ve always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it had meant that I couldn’t read for the years it might take to complete a novel.

    To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read another writer whose work is entirely different from the first, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.

    AFTER my novels began to be published, I started to teach, taking a succession of jobs as a visiting writer at a series of colleges and universities. Usually, I would teach one creative writing workshop each semester, together with a literature class entitled something like The Modern Short Story—a course designed for undergraduates who weren’t planning to major in literature or go on to graduate school and so would not be damaged by my inability to teach literary theory. Alternately, I would conduct a reading seminar for MFA students who wanted to be writers rather than scholars, which meant that it was all right for us to fritter away our time talking about books rather than politics or ideas.

    I enjoyed the reading classes, and the opportunity to function as a sort of cheerleader for literature. I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously, I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.

    No wonder my students found it so stressful to read! And possibly because of the harsh judgments they felt required to make about fictional characters and their creators, they didn’t seem to like reading, which also made me worry for them and wonder why they wanted to become writers. I asked myself how they planned to learn to write, since I had always thought that others learned, as I had, from reading.

    Responding to what my students seemed to need, I began to change the way I taught. No more general discussions of this character or that plot turn. No more attempts to talk about how it felt to read Borges or Poe or to describe the experience of navigating the fantastic fictional worlds they created. It was a pity, because I’d often enjoyed these wide-ranging discussions, during which my students said things I would always remember. I recall one student saying that reading the stories of Bruno Schulz was like being a child again, hiding behind the door, eavesdropping on the adults, understanding a fraction of what they were saying and inventing the rest. But I assumed that I would still hear such things even if I organized classes around the more pedestrian, halting method of beginning at the beginning, lingering over every word, every phrase, every image, considering how it enhanced and contributed to the story as a whole. In this way, the students and I would get through as much of the text as possible—sometimes three or four, sometimes as many as ten, pages—in a two-hour class.

    This remains the way I prefer to teach, partly because it’s a method from which I benefit nearly as much as my students. And there are many stories that I have taught for years and from which I learn more each time I read them, word by word.

    I’ve always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly.

    Occasionally, while I was teaching a reading course and simultaneously working on a novel, and when I had reached an impasse in my own work, I began to notice that whatever story I taught that week somehow helped me get past the obstacle that had been in my way. Once, for example, I was struggling with a party scene and happened to be teaching James Joyce’s The Dead, which taught me something about how to orchestrate the voices of the party guests into a chorus from which the principal players step forward, in turn, to take their solos.

    On another occasion, I was writing a story that I knew was going to end in an eruption of horrific violence, and I was having trouble getting it to sound natural and inevitable rather than forced and melodramatic. Fortunately, I was teaching the stories of Isaac Babel, whose work so often explores the nature, the causes, and the aftermath of violence. What I noticed, close-reading along with my students, was that frequently in Babel’s fiction, a moment of violence is directly preceded by a passage of intense lyricism. It’s characteristic of Babel to offer the reader a lovely glimpse of the crescent moon just before all hell breaks loose. I tried it—first the poetry, then the horror—and suddenly everything came together, the pacing seemed right, and the incident I had been struggling with appeared, at least to me, to be plausible and convincing.

    Close reading helped me figure out, as I hoped it did for my students, a way to approach a difficult aspect of writing, which is nearly always difficult. Readers of this book will notice that there are writers to whom I keep returning: Chekhov, Joyce, Austen, George Eliot, Kafka, Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant—the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.

    TWO

    Words

    WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I HAD A PIANO TEACHER WHO tried to encourage her uninspired students with a system of rewards. A memorized Clementi sonatina or a completed theory workbook earned us a certain number of stars that added up to the grand prize: a small, unpainted plaster bust of a famous composer: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart.

    The idea, I suppose, was that we were meant to line up the statues on the piano as sort of an altar to which we would offer up our finger exercises in the faint hope of winning these dead men’s approval. I was fascinated by their powdered wigs and their stern—or in the case of Chopin, dreamy—expressions. They were like chalky, bodiless dolls I couldn’t imagine dressing up.

    Unfortunately for my piano teacher and me, I didn’t much care about winning the dead composers’ good opinions, perhaps because I already knew that I never would.

    I had my own private pantheon made up not of composers but of writers: P. L. Travers, Astrid Lindgren, E. Nesbit, the idols of my childhood. Theirs was the approval I longed for, the company I longed to join as they floated above me, giving me something to think about during those

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