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 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Sentences”
The craft of putting together a well-made sentence often goes ignored in favor of the more commercially viable aspects of writing, such as coming up with a pacy plot. However, Prose argues that the ability to construct a fine sentence is crucial for a writer. Reading across genres, Prose suggests, is a great way to discover and study powerful sentences. Writers of lyrical fiction can learn from journalists, who are tasked with delivering the most information in the least number of words. Journalists can learn from memoirists. Prose compares quotes from 20th-century British writer Rebecca West’s travel memoir Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and novel The Birds Fall Down (1966) to show how West’s memoirist’s ear for sentences informs and even slightly supersedes the writing in West’s novel.
Prose asks readers to consider what constitutes a beautiful sentence. The answer is evasive because taste is subjective. Perhaps a good sentence is one that makes the reader notice its beauty. While finding a single definition for a beautiful sentence is difficult, the very fact that a reader is paying attention to sentence construction means they are on their way to becoming a writer. To show how widely beautiful sentences vary, Prose examines sentences by Samuel Johnson (British, 18th century); Virginia Woolf (British, early 20th century); and Philip Roth (American, late 20th century). A passage from Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744) takes the universal truth of life being misery and qualifies that truth with several clauses and parenthetical twists. The pleasure of reading the sentence lies in unpacking the flow of thought. A passage from Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), in contrast, features many sentences that are fragments and lack verbs yet nonetheless build an impassioned argument. Finally, Woolf’s 181-word-long sentence from her essay “Being Ill” (1926) shows how even long sentences can be remarkably lucid.
Prose suggests that students of writing use the old exercise of diagramming sentences—visually mapping out the components of a sentence—to understand how the form works. Figuring out the grammar of a sentence, as well as revising word choices, also helps. William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1920) is a handy grammar manual to refine one’s sentences. However, while learning the rules of grammar are important, rules should not inhibit experimentation or development of a unique style. That is why learning grammar should go hand in hand with studying how different writers use and reinvent the sentence. Prose goes on to show how introductory sentences in stories and essays are of particular importance. Great introductory sentences, such as those by 19th-century German writer Heinrich Von Kleist, pack in a volume of storytelling in just a few phrases. A good example of Kleist’s style is the opening of his 1807 short story “The Earthquake in Chile:”
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the very moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands of lives were lost, a young Spaniard by the name of Jéronimo Rugera, who had been locked up on a criminal charge, was standing against a prison pillar, about to hang himself (55).
Keeping handy books by authors who polish their sentences helps a writer refine their own practice.
If writers like Woolf and Kleist pack in the details, writers like the American modernist Ernst Hemingway perfect the lean sentence. Hemingway believed in using sentences that were spare and short, as close to reportage as possible. Yet, Prose notes, Hemingway’s illusion of simplicity was carefully constructed. Hemingway’s sentences are stylized and rhythmic. In fact, rhythm is an important quality in sentences, though rhythm is often believed to belong to poems alone. Prose quotes “The Dead” (1926), a story by 20th-century Irish innovator James Joyce, to show the qualities of poetry in good prose:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried (67).
She draws attention to the repetition of “falling” in the sentences, as well as the alliterative and consonant F sounds through the passage.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Paragraphs”
Isaac Babel, recognized as one of the world’s greatest short story writers of the 20th century, famously claimed that a new paragraph could act as a lightning flash in a story, showing the same landscape from a different viewpoint. Prose examines Babel’s use of paragraphs in the opening section of his short story “Crossing into Poland” (1920) to show how the ending line of each paragraph adds a new note of menace to the story. For instance, the opening paragraph begins with the arrival of a commander on a field of victory and ends on the line that the highway on which the commander stands is built “on the bones of peasants” (74).
Prose uses the analogy of a breath to compare the movement of lines across a paragraph. The first few lines serve as an inhalation, while the ending line is an exhalation. A powerful ending line, such as in Babel’s story, is the equivalent of a held breath. Making the reader thus catch their breath is an important storytelling feat. An effective way to use the flash to which Babel refers is using paragraph shifts to indicate a change in perspective and point of view. In the opening section of contemporary American writer Denis Johnson’s Angels (1983), for instance, successive paragraphs convey shifts in time and perspective.
Yet, just like in the case of sentences, there is no single rule for building effective paragraphs. As Babel himself said, “a set of dead rules is no good” (72). Contemporary writers such as American novelist Paula Fox, for example, sometimes use the paragraph very differently from Babel, as in the case of the passage Prose quotes from Fox’s seminal novel Desperate Characters (1970). In Fox’s passage, the drama peaks in the middle of the paragraph as a character is unexpectedly bitten by a cat, yet the rest of the lines are no less dramatic in portraying the character’s complex response to this event.
With such different examples of writing, how does a writer define a paragraph? Prose suggests that the rules of grammar manuals can provide a starting point to organizing paragraphs, guiding how to break up long paragraphs for visual relief. However, as a writer’s practice strengthens, they can break the rules, just as 20th-century Colombian magic realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez does when he writes paragraphs that can span multiple pages. One literary convention Prose cautions the beginner writer against is the too-frequent use of the single-sentence paragraph: “Overused, it can be an annoying tic, a lazy writer’s attempt […] of falsely inflating the importance of sentences that our eye might skip over entirely if they were placed, more quietly and modestly, inside a longer paragraph” (84). As always, there are exceptions to the rule, such as the opening one-line paragraph of 19th-century British writer Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), one of the most famous sentences in English Literature: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (85).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Prose’s literary style and narration continue to reflect her guidance, with Prose often employing ironic and humorous anecdotes as a literary device. For example, Prose begins Chapter 3 with an anecdote shared with her by a young writer friend. When the writer’s impressive literary agent took the young man to dinner, the writer shared with the agent that his utmost interest was in writing great sentences. The agent sighed in exasperation and instructed the writer never to disclose this information to an American publisher. The story is a pithy comment on the nature of publishing, revealing that most commercial publishers favor writers who focus on plot, rather than language. In Prose’s writing, the anecdote’s form draws the narrator and reader into an intimate circle, using humor to add a layer of meaning that straightforward narration would not. Using anecdotes is a stylistic choice that Prose makes to enliven her writing, and the choice is a meta-comment on the lessons Prose is offering. That is, even in writing her lessons, she follows her own advice of careful word choices.
Another of the narration’s other hallmarks is that Prose continues to embrace contradictions, staying committed to Debunking Myths About Rules of Writing. The chapter on sentences is a case in point. Prose first suggests that a beautiful sentence is difficult to define. However, as a guiding principle on sentences, a beginner writer should start with perfecting grammar. She goes on to give three examples of beautiful sentences from three very different authors. One of these authors is Philip Roth. The passage that Prose quotes from Roth, however, contains several sentences that are not sentences by definition, but fragments:
A guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm (49).
Roth’s sentences seem to contradict Prose’s advice about practicing proper, grammatical forms. But Prose’s point is deeper, emphasizing The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature: what she actually suggests is that learning the rules of grammar is only the first step toward ultimately reforging them, the way Roth does. Only when a writer perfects the form can they reinvent it. In fact, Prose’s decision to include Roth can be seen as a deliberate choice to reinforce this lesson while illustrating her earlier point about the evasiveness of definitions. Throughout the book, Prose repeats that there is no such thing as universal writing advice, urging writers instead to read discerningly. In fact, Prose argues that writing advice, even her own, can be so contradictory that it can never be distilled or abstracted. In Chapter 4, as she observes, “it seems easier to learn by example than by abstraction, by reading Babel’s fiction to see how his ideas about electrical storms and rhythm operate in practice” (73).
The advice about learning from example highlights the book’s key theme of Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing, with close reading in particular being an important element in the practice of writing. Close reading shows the beginner writer that no single rule applies to all great writers, as is apparent in the way that great writers use sentences and paragraphs differently. The text raises an interesting question here: if there is no single universal rule or definition, how does a beginner create a beautiful sentence and a powerful paragraph? How does a writer know what they are creating is actually beautiful? These questions crop up throughout the course of the book, forming a recurrent motif in the narrative. In Chapters 3 and 4, Prose suggests the answer to these questions lies in looking at the literary form as well as one’s writing consciously and critically. “Merely thinking about ‘the paragraph’ puts us ahead of the game,” Prose argues, “just as being conscious of the sentence as an entity worthy of our attention represents a major step in the right direction” (73). An important symbol that emerges in this section is what early-20th-century Russian writer Isaac Babel called the “flash of lightning,” referring to a sudden change in perspective that a new paragraph can provide. While Babel uses the term in the context of paragraphs, Prose broadens the concept, exploring the idea of how subtle changes in writing can illuminate new aspects of a story.
Babel is one of Prose’s go-to writers, but she notes that what she has read is Babel in translation. Because Babel wrote in Russian, what the reader in English is reading is a collaboration of Babel and his translator, in this case, Walter Morrison. This observation applies as well for Chekov, who also wrote in Russian; for 20th-century surrealist Franz Kafka, who write in German; and for Marquez, who wrote in Spanish. Prose’s use of translated works suggests that great literature transcends not only time, but also the barriers of language. Further, the fact that Prose quotes from so many writers writing in languages other than English, and from many writers who are women, constitutes at least a partial rebuttal to the criticism that she skews toward the white male canon. As the book proceeds, it also becomes clear Prose does not only refer to classical literature, but also alludes to some genre fiction.
