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

Considered one of the experts of the modern short story, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. Chekov was born into a struggling, working-class household and had a difficult relationship with his father, who forced Chekov to work at a grocer’s shop to supplement the family income. In 1879, the family moved to Moscow, where Chekov began to study medicine, graduating as a physician in 1884. Alongside his medical studies, and later his practice, Chekov wrote pseudonymous humorous sketches for magazines. By the late 1880s, he turned his attention to more serious literary work, publishing his autobiographically inspired breakthrough story “Steppe” in a literary magazine in 1888. Chekov also began writing plays, many of which were tragedies. His literary reputation rests on his plays and the 50 stories he wrote from 1888 to 1904, the year in which he died from tuberculosis in Germany. Chekov’s contribution to the short story cannot be overstated. He wrote stories that were famously open-ended, refusing to resolve the contradictions of life. Rather than focus on twisty plots, Chekov brought his attention to small details and the revealing actions of his characters. His writing is also considered remarkable for its observation of human nature and deep compassion for suffering.

In Reading Like a Writer, Chekov functions as one of the timeless mentors of author Francine Prose, and in turn, perhaps the reader too. Prose examines Chekov’s life and works in detail to argue that he is a writer anyone who wants to craft fiction should read closely. Chekov is the only writer in the text to whom Prose dedicates an entire chapter, and her references to his work form a running motif in the text. Of particular importance are Chekov’s use of detail and gesture to build character and atmosphere. In making the case that Chekov’s details tell a story of their own, Prose notes, for example, a slice of watermelon a man eats in the room of the woman with whom he may be having an affair (“The Lady with the Dog) and a potato landed in blood after an act of violence (“The Murder”). In Chapter 9, “Learning from Chekov,” Prose asserts that Chekov’s work showed her how all her writing advice was incomplete. If she told a student not to name characters similarly, she would discover Chekov’s “The Two Volodyas,” which features two characters called Volodya. On telling a student not to take too many shifts of perspective in a short story, she would encounter “Gusev,” in which the perspective shifts from the dying consciousness of the drowning main character to a school of fish to a shark to clouds overhead in a matter of paragraphs. These coincidences lead Prose to her real observation about Chekov: He believed “that judgment and prejudice were incommensurate with a certain kind of literary art” (268). Because Chekov considered himself an observer of life, he took in the world in all its contradictions and flaws. This is why he can depict great oddities (such as a woman being in love with two men called Volodya) realistically. Prose quotes from Chekov’s letters and essays to paint a picture of a creator who prized reality: “a writer is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound under compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist” (266).

Russian journalist and short story expert Isaac Babel was born into a Jewish family in 1894 in Odessa, a city-state of the then Russian empire. Babel is known for his crisp prose and clear-eyed depiction of war and violence. His life story is as remarkable as the two short story collections that made his name: Red Cavalry (1920s) and Odessa Stories (1931). In 1905, Babel survived an anti-Jewish pogrom in which his grandfather was murdered. He faced acts of antisemitic discrimination throughout his life and moved to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1915 to protest laws confining Jews to certain quarters. In Petrograd, he pursued parallel careers as a short story writer and a reporter, both forms of writing informing the other. As a journalist, Babel witnessed the Russian Civil War (1917-1923) and the rise of the dictator Joseph Stalin up close, experiences that inform the works in Red Cavalry. Babel’s search for a story sometimes took him recklessly close to danger, such as when he made connections among Russia’s notorious secret police. Though he was initially in favor of the newly formed Soviet government, over time he began to resist the pressure to write pro-government pieces. As a mark of protest, he abstained from writing altogether. In 1939, Babel was taken from his home by members of the Soviet secret services and apparently sent to a prison camp in Siberia, where he supposedly died in 1941. It was revealed only years later that the secret services had shot him dead in 1940.

Babel is one of the writers to whom Prose frequently refers in her book. According to Prose, Babel’s greatest qualities as a writer are his gift of creating momentous paragraph shifts and, more broadly, his courage. Prose quotes Babel’s important insights on the use of the paragraph: “A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect” (74). She goes on to show how Babel expertly used the ending lines of paragraphs to build up a certain mood in his stories. In “My First Goose,” Babel spends most of a paragraph describing a soldier’s impressive uniformed appearance, only to end the paragraph on a disquieting line: “His long legs were like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots” (75). The strange line introduces a note of foreboding. Apart from his work, Prose also uses Babel’s life as a model of how to write—and live—with courage. Because of both his unrelenting search for a story and his refusal to compromise his art, Babel paid with his life. Prose notes that “if art demanded Babel’s life, we can certainly handle whatever inconvenience or effort it seems to require from us” (289).

Jane Austen (1775-1817), an English writer, was one of the innovators of the modern Western novel. Austen’s work, which remains popular even centuries after her death, is remarkable for its depiction of everyday life and the nuanced, realistic depiction of characters. During her lifetime, Austen published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published together, after her death in 1817. Austen’s achievements are all the more remarkable because they came at a time when female novelists were still writing under male pseudonyms, and Gothic fiction, featuring supernatural elements, was in vogue. Describing her writing process and the middle-class landscape she depicted, Austen famously said it was “a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labor” (Galperin, William. “Taming Austen: 1817-1821 and Now.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 67, 2018, pp. 182-88).

Prose counts Austen as one of “the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult” (18) for writing practice. The aspect of Austen’s writing to which Prose most refers is Austen’s gift for character. She notes how Austen uses a few lines of irony and observation to definitively portray even minor characters. In Austen’s hands, a short stretch of dialogue can sketch entire characters and complex relationships, as in the case of this bit of conversation between a husband and wife from Pride and Prejudice:

‘Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.’

‘You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.’ (Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Penguin, 2003, p. 7).

These lines establish several key facts: the wife’s tendency to exaggerate, the husband’s wit, and the use of that wit as a coping mechanism in their marriage. Thus, Prose reveals, Austen can build up a universe in her two inches of ivory.

American short story writer, novelist, and essayist Flannery O’Connor is famous for her use of the Southern Gothic style, which combines elements of Gothic fiction in settings in the American South. O’Connor’s stories often feature eccentric and odd characters, striking detail, and an expert use of dialogue. O’Connor was a practicing Roman Catholic, and her religious sensibility often informs her work, especially her two novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). O’Connor also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, O’Connor graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1945. In 1952, after she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease lupus, which had killed her father, she retired to the family farm in Andalusia, Savannah. She continued to write, read, and maintain an active social life despite the debilitating effects of the disease and her medication. O’Connor passed away from complications due to lupus in 1964.

References to O’Connor’s writing are another a motif in Prose’s book. Prose examines O’Connor’s short stories and her novel Wise Blood in the context of inimitable word choices, expert narration, and precise details and gestures. She also offers O’Connor’s will to write despite an incurable, debilitating disease as an example of writerly courage. Perhaps it is because of this courage that O’Connor took bold risks in her writing, such as shifting the point of view in narration every few sentences in the opening section of Wise Blood. Through Prose’s eyes, O’Connor emerges as a writer who depicts the extremes of life with precise, careful literary choices.