Reading Like a Writer

Most books on writing tell you what not to do. Classes, books and workshops are almost always focused on the "rules" of writing. There are those who are willing to admit that great writers break the rules, but usually it's just lip service. Nobody wants to tell new writers that frankly, they can do whatever they can get away with. This is Prose's message, and it's refreshing.

Her contention is that it's more important for a writer to learn what to write than what not to write, and the way to do this is to read great fiction and study each word, like an engineer disassembling a machine to see how it works. She starts with a chapter on word choice and expands into sentences, then paragraphs, and finally into the broad lenses of narration, character, dialogue, etc. The central theme of the book is always words and how they fit together.

Examples from short stories, novellas and novels are liberally sprinkled throughout each chapter to illuminate Prose's points. These are helpful, but the scope is a bit too limited for my taste. Prose makes a big deal of reading widely, but the pieces showcased are all literary fiction, and most of them are decades, if not centuries, old. There is little modern fiction, and nothing that so much as skirts the edges of genre fiction. Science fiction is mentioned exactly once, in passing, with a vaguely derisive tone. But, as sad as it is, I suppose this is to be expected from the lit fic crowd.

Still, the examples illustrate the points they were intended to illustrate. In the sea of books on plotting, characters, and other macro-structural elements, the focus on micro-structure, on words and details, is refreshing. Equally important is the emphasis on what can be done, rather than what shouldn't. The message is positive: there have been innumerable authors in the past who have done amazing things with words. You can too.