“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
Despite a life-long reading addiction and numerous literature and craft courses, not to mention Francine Prose’s excellent book by the same name, it took me a long time to realize that reading like a writer requires both a specific mindset and a fair amount of time. Over the years, one thing I’ve found helpful is analyzing writing I admire through specific lenses.
Here are a few of my own tips for reading like a writer to improve your work:
- Whenever I run across a piece of prose that makes me think “I wish I could do that,” I make a list of the different elements that might be making the difference. Those could be striking choices or techniques that seem key to the story, issues in my own work that I’ve been wrestling with, or techniques I want to try. For example, when I first started working on CAPTIVES, I had a hard time moving the story from place to place, so I took a good look at how some of my favourite authors handled space and time.
- I’ve found it helpful to narrow down the topic as much as possible. Rather than looking at an entire novel or even short story, or a big topic like “setting,” it’s more useful to focus on a particular section, such as “how is the lakeside setting used to advance plot and character in Chapter Two?” Then, read through once for narrative and first impressions, then a second time for the most relevant words and sentences.
- By the third reading, I’m ready to start analyzing and thinking about the links of what I find to my own work. I look at the immediate effect of the particular passage, and how that advances the piece’s larger goals. Often, it’s just as useful to look at a small amount of material, even particular sentences, intensely, rather than scanning larger amounts of a work.
Some possible topics to work through:
- Point of view and its effects
- Choice of characters/narrators to reveal certain plot points
- Narrative distance, especially shifts
- Balance of description and action
- Shifts in sentence structure and rhythm
- Use of cliches or tropes
- How one character’s reactions are used to reveal another character
- What the point of view character’s descriptions/observations reveal about them
- Braided structures/timelines
- Foreshadowing
- Breadcrumbing/reveal of information
- Plot beats
- Balance of dialogue vs. action
- Use of slang, jargon, dialect
- Physical descriptions of characters
- Establishment of setting and atmosphere
- Effects of setting on the plot
- How setting affects and reveals character
- Patterns of imagery
- Unusual word choices
The bottom line is writing is a series of choices, all of which can affect the final outcome and impact of the story. Understanding these decisions, and their outcomes, is time-consuming but worthwhile.