54 pages • 1 hour read
Francine ProseReading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Learning from Chekov”
Prose offers a small anecdote to encapsulate her greatest learning from Anton Chekov. While commuting to teach a creative writing class in New Rochelle in the 1980s, Prose would often read the stories of Chekov on the bus. On the final day of her class, students asked her for her last, definitive bit of advice on writing. Prose suggested the students hone their powers of observation and consciousness. At the time, Prose believed her advice was influenced by her reading of Chekov’s short stories, informed by a deep, sympathetic observation of life. However, she soon came to feel that this writing advice was not what she had actually gleaned from Chekov. All through the semester, Prose had been noting a pattern: For every rule she conveyed in the New Rochelle writing class, a story by Chekov existed that would contradict the rule. For instance, she suggested a student not use similar names for characters in a story to avoid confusing the reader. The same day, she read Chekov’s “The Two Volodyas” (1983), featuring two identically named characters, on the bus. Chekov’s stories seemed to break every writing rule that Prose knew. Prose also noticed that in Chekov’s stories, characters sometimes did terrible, unexpected things without apparent motivation or preexisting build-up.
To understand Chekov’s elusive rules about writing, Prose quotes an event from his life. When asked about his method of composing a story, Chekov picked up an ashtray and said: “This is my method of composition […] Tomorrow I will write a story called ‘The Ashtray’” (265). As Prose read more of Chekov’s writing and his writing about writing, she learnt that his great gift was not just observing the world, but observing the world without judgement, including all its anomalies, such as two people having the same name or a person suddenly committing violence. If Prose could go back in time, she would simply advise the New Rochelle students to read all of Chekov and then to go out in the world and observe things without judgment.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Reading for Courage”
Writing requires bravery. This statement may seem frivolous, given that people such as firefighters and construction workers risk their lives in their line of work. Yet people who write professionally know that the seemingly safe task of writing at a desk requires a lot of nerve. Writers must overcome their fear of being mediocre, their fear of revealing themselves, of losing the good opinion of the world in order to write. This fear is one more reason for writers to read.
Reading helps a writer see that others before them have dared to write risky, original fiction. Moreover, wide reading shows writers that there are no rules in literature. Every writing rule out there has been flouted by a great writer. Prose argues that reading gives a beginner writer courage to experiment in a way that a writing or literature seminar may not. Workshop rules can sometimes focus too much on a particular approach, such as constructing an entire history for each protagonist. But what if this particular approach does not work for someone? That student may feel they have failed as a writer of fiction. Conversely, if reading is one’s guide, the writer can turn to a story like Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s “First Love” (1946), in which very little is apparent about the narrator’s background. Reading Beckett will indicate to the same writer that effective fiction can in fact be written without detailing the protagonist’s individual history.
Another lesson that reading provides is the courage to resist the writing prescriptions of one’s culture. For instance, prevalent norms may dictate how a story ends, typically by tying up loose ends. Yet Chekov’s masterpiece, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899), has a very open ending. Sometimes, what writers resist is not just their writing culture, but their sociopolitical climate. Writers like Isaac Babel have paid for such courage with their lives. Pressured to write pro-Stalin pieces, Babel began to refrain from all writing. In 1939, he was arrested by the Russian secret police and killed soon after.
Reading also gives the writer courage to craft unsympathetic characters. Contemporary writing advice suggests that writers make their character sympathetic, which is code for making characters likeable and identifiable. However, reading great works shows that protagonists hardly need to be perfect or likeable for the reader to connect with them. In Crime and Punishment (1866), Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky presents the lead character of Raskolnikov, who kills two old women. Crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s narrators are often sociopaths. Readers come to appreciate these characters anyway because of their writer’s skill with storytelling, characterization, dialogue, and detail. Finally, reading gives a writer the courage to write in moments they think writing is inconsequential. At such times, writing may seem beside the point, but reading shows the writer that a poem or a story can provide enormous comfort in the bleakest of eras. Thus, texts are always worth creating. If a writer wonders whether their writing is worth providing such comfort, the answer again lies in reading. The more one reads, the more they will be able to tell the roses from the weeds in their own writing.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
In the final section of the book, Prose moves away from her deep dive into literary forms to distill the lessons of her text, driving home The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature. She approaches these lessons through her own reading of one of the greats: Anton Chekov. To show how a writer never stops learning, or reviewing what she has learnt, Prose structures her lessons as a series of revelations, each more profound than the previous. In the beginning, the lesson she thinks she has taken from Chekov is to observe the world consciously. That is therefore the lesson she imparts to her New Rochelle class. However, as she keeps returning to Chekov’s stories, biography, and his nonfiction writing, she realizes that the lesson she offered is incomplete. For example, Prose began to notice that Chekov, who was also a medical doctor, brought a clinical sensibility to his approach to writing. In a letter, he wrote:
That the world ‘swarms with male and female scum’ is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect. But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself […] A writer must be as objective as a chemist (265).
Prose began to see how this sensibility plays out in Chekov’s writing. He depicts all kinds of characters and situations, some improbable, many outrageous, all the while Debunking Myths About Rules of Writing. Even the rich can be sympathetic in his writings. Chekov also seems to know the interior life of everyone, including pregnant women. Prose asked herself how Chekov could know so much. The conclusion she came to was that, when writing, Chekov suspends all judgement and prejudice. Chekov, like any other human, had judgement and opinions; however, he believed that judgement could hamper a literary artist from observing the many twists and turns of human nature. After Prose understood this aspect of Chekov’s approach, her writing advice transformed. Now, she would advise her students to forget about observing life consciously; instead, she would tell them to focus on admitting that one knows anything, so it is best to empty one’s mind and simply watch the world.
These last chapters, in line with the opening of the novel, emphasize the persona of Prose as a humble learner. In discussing Chekov, she notes: “Chekhov was teaching me how to teach, and yet I remained a slow learner” (262). Prose is teaching by example here, showing writing students that to learn one must, like Chekov, like Prose, admit a position of not knowing, of making mistakes. This humility is central to the learning of writing, and it underlines the value of Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing. From solving the question of how to write, Prose moves to an even more fundamental question in the book’s closing chapter: why to read and write at all? The question of why one should read is easier to answer. Writers can read for courage, for inspiration, for sustenance. However, the question of why one should write is trickier. There are times when any writer questions the use of their writing. As Prose notes, the writer may well ask: “Who can be saved by a terrific sonnet? Whom can we feed with a short story” (290)?
Prose acknowledges that in times of war, of global economic inequality, of racial violence, that is, times such as most people inhabit, writing may seem a pointless activity. However, she then turns to the poem “Five Men” by Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. In the poem, Herbert imagines the execution of five men and wonders why he has written all this while “unimportant poems on flowers” (291) when executions go on in the world. He imagines what the five men talked about the night before the execution. It would probably not have been their impeding death, but memories of good times, vodka, romance, fruits, and life. That is why, Herbert concludes his poem, he still writes poetry: in an effort to offer to “the betrayed world / a rose” (292). Even poems on roses and flowers are important because they call to our humanity. That is why, Prose suggests, one writes: to offer a wounded world a way to heal and be human. Thus, she ends her text on the same positive, humanist note that informs her writing lessons.
