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

“It required what a friend calls ‘putting every word on trial for its life.’”

Through this tiny anecdote, author Francine Prose dismantles the myth that writing is effortless. Just like reading is done word by word, writing too is achieved one step at a time. To describe the process of fiercely editing one’s own writing, Prose uses the analogy of a trial. Writing entails carefully questioning the use and choice of each word.

“And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?”

Prose’s subtly humorous framing of her devotion to writers from the past introduces her insistence on The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature. She calls for close reading specifically of the classics, especially conducted in solitude. This approach, she argues, is one of the oldest forms of learning writing.

“On one family vacation, my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon.”

With this funny personal anecdote, Prose shows how most writers, like her, were first avid readers. Another of Prose’s themes in the book is Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing. To want to be a writer, one has to be a reader who lives in the world of books, much as her younger self did, impressed more by a story than the Grand Canyon itself.

“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.”

Prose acknowledges the argument that reading great literature might be counterproductive. However, she disagrees with the assertation that great literarture only reminds the reader of their own shortcomings with writing. On the contrary, Prose asserts, reading masterpieces makes one smarter by osmosis. Additionally, great writing awakens a reader to their own possibilities.

“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.”

One of the text’s key themes is Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing, with Prose recommending that close reading in particular should be an essential component of any writing course. Prose also presents the somewhat provocative view that writing workshops do not work in isolation since they chiefly tell a writer what not to do. Close reading in solitude, meanwhile, is a more forgiving, constructive process. While Prose’s argument that close reading and writing workshops should work in tandem is constructive, her assertion that workshops are necessarily limiting to creativity may be debatable.

“You can assume that if a writer’s work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.”

In one of the more debatable assertions in the book, Prose states that the traditional canon survives solely because the works in it are enduring and meritorious. Her assertion somewhat makes light of the politics behind constituting a canon. For instance, till the early 19th century, the novel was considered inferior to poetry in no small part because it was female novelists who had begun to perfect the novel form. Nonetheless, Prose seems to dismiss the fact that the gatekeepers of high culture come with their own biases and may defend a writer on that basis. Moreover, she seems to insist that the existing canon is indeed universal, which may neglect the feelings of writers who would find it difficult to find authors in the canon who give voice to their specific struggles.

“All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.”

Drawing attention to the granular detail of writing, Prose asserts that each word choice is critical. A writer’s deliberate choice of words—the use of a particular word and not its synonym—not only creates a beautiful sentence but also actively draws the reader into a story.

“You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I’m only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.”

Prose argues that the assumption that only popular and commercially successful fiction is worth reading can actively mar one’s writing practice. While such writing too is worth reading, Prose suggests that a writer’s reading should span farther back in time. In particular, Prose is implying once again The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature.

“There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.”

Prose offers this incisive advice in the context of the writing rule of “show, don’t tell.” The writing of experts like Alice Munro shows that this maxim is outdated. Further, Munro’s dismantling of the maxim illustrates an important theme in the text: that writing rules are by no means infallible and universal.

“The well-made sentence transcends time and genre. A beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written, or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article.”

Prose explains why a line from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, or any of a person’s favorite writers sticks in their head. The beauty of a sentence is difficult to describe, except through the effect it creates. The particular effect Prose describes here is that of persisting in memory. By a combination of rhythm, emotional truth, and meaning, a beautiful sentence endures.

“A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process.”

Prose often presents her tips on writing through humor and arresting anecdotes, an approach this passage illustrates. The advice here is to gauge one’s sentences by reading them aloud. The better a sentence sounds, the better it tends to read on the page. The anecdote of the poet escaping the thief is outrageous and specific enough to enthrall, and the lesson Prose derives from it is true on many levels. Reading aloud does literally save the poet’s life, and by encouraging good writing, may figuratively save that of the writer.

“A neighbor once told me he had trouble with García Márquez’s novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and The Autumn of the Patriarch gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.”

While a writer like Marquez can successfully create a gripping novel without paragraph breaks, the anecdote Prose relates shows that paragraph breaks are important to let a reader catch their breath. Not only do paragraph breaks provide visual relief, they also allow the reader to breathe through the text and savor it.

“Paragraphs are a form of emphasis. What appears at the start and end of the paragraph has […] greater weight than what appears in the middle.”

Prose’s close examination of the paragraph reveals an important truth about how information is distributed across the form. A paragraph naturally lends itself to weighty reveals occurring at either end. Of course, like any other rule, this too can be, and is subverted, by many writers.

“Paragraphing is as particular, as individual to each writer, as the fingerprint at the crime scene, as that telltale trace of DNA.”

On the surface, Prose’s observation is about the individual, inimitable way in which every writer uses a paragraph. However, by extension, this observation also applies to all of a writer’s writing. Each writer, when they discover their voice, writes uniquely.

“Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.”

While Prose maintains in the text that writing rules cannot be prescriptive, there are some rules that are truer than other. One of these rules is to use the second-person point of view only when the story demands it. Being conscious about rules is good in this context because it helps make a writer aware of their choices.

“But what is less generally recognized is how often the omniscient, or godlike, narrator also has a very particular or even quirky personality, much the way the character of God can change (as it does, for example, from the Old to the New Testaments) depending on the needs and intentions of the deity’s followers.”

One of the important features of the book is that because of its deep dive into form, it digs up fresh insights on familiar concepts. Here, Prose shows how the third-person-omniscient narrator in literature is not necessarily neutral as is generally supposed. All-knowing does not equal impartial or normal; further, it can even be peculiar.

“I realize that I have taken my examples from works of earlier centuries, and that equally useful passages could be gathered from contemporary fiction in which the characters seem, on the surface, more like us […]. But I think you would have had a hard time convincing my students of that, in that classroom in Salt Lake City, on that winter morning on which they discussed their new friend, the Marquise of O-.”

Prose’s tone at having used examples of older classics is one of surprise, but the surprise is, of course, an artifice. The author uses these examples deliberately to make the broader point that great, enduring characters connect with the reader despite the distance of culture and time. Writing on scandalous themes in the early 19th century, Heinrich von Kleist managed to create characters that resonated with conservative youth in the late 20th century.

“Dialogue differs from story to story, novel to novel, conversation to conversation. There are as many kinds of dialogue in fiction as the sum total of stories, novels, and characters that exist. And really that shouldn’t surprise us. Because what is dialogue, after all, but the speech that could only come from the mouth of one character in all of fiction, and from the mind of one writer?”

The text often makes the case that writing, especially good writing, has a unique quality. Prose uses different aspects of writing, such as paragraphs and dialogue, to reinforce this point. Here, she argues that dialogue is doubly unique because it first mimics the uniqueness and quirkiness of human conversation and is then translated as a writer’s particular version of that conversation.

“He told me that the whole reason the class believed the woman’s story—a gothic tall tale about a gangrenous cat bite—was entirely because of the detail about the father’s love for steak and the mother’s passion for tofu. ‘Trust me on this,’ my friend said. ‘God really is in the details.’”

An interesting question that the text poses concerns what makes fiction believable. After all, even knowing that stories are lies, readers nonetheless become invested in certain stories, no matter how outrageous or surrealistic. The answer to the question, Prose argues, lies in the details. Readers suspend their disbelief and invest in a story when its detail rings true to them. The detail speaks an emotional truth to the reader and grabs their attention.

“Mediocre writing abounds with physical clichés and stock gestures.”

The importance of specificness in writing is an important motif in the text. The more particular and specific is the detail, the gesture, or the dialogue, the more powerful is the story. On the other hand, cliché gestures, like wiping sweat off a brow, weaken a narrative.

“It might be argued that the recording of small gesture rather than the Big Idea is a more worthwhile use for one’s empty notebook.”

A representative example of Prose’s dryly humorous narrative voice, this statement favors the particular against the general. It slyly dismantles the beginner writer’s lofty search for the next big idea, suggesting instead they observe and record life first to draw an idea from it.

“An actor once told me that years ago he had watched an old man caught in the rain without an umbrella, and that he had later used the old man’s hunched, defensive walk in portraying a father bowed by grief over the sudden death of a child.”

Observing and recording life benefits art in multiple ways. The idea of creating something from life is not to mimic life, but to translate life in the right context. An actor can use an old man’s hunched walk in the rain to recreate the image of a grieving father. Here prose also makes the point that writers can benefit not only from reading across genres, but also from studying the techniques of artists—such as actors—in other media.

“It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.”

Prose borrows this quote from the great Russian author Chekov. In a letter, Chekov asserts that writers accept the contradictions and open-ended resolutions of the world. When a writer enters this state of acceptance, they can truly begin to observe life in its infinite possibilities and impossibilities and thus create meaningful art.