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

In the opening chapter of Reading Like a Writer, author Francine Prose offers a caveat when it comes to the importance of creative writing workshops. Workshops are useful, she says, and provide a community that can sustain a writer. She herself was once in such a class. “But that class, as helpful as it was, was not where I learned to write” (7), Prose observes. How she learned to write was “by writing and by example, from books” (8). Prose’s statements encapsulate one of the key themes of her book: reading is an essential part of learning how to write. The reading to which Prose refers is specifically “close reading,” which refers to paying careful attention to even the smallest sections of a text. Instead of skimming through a narrative, close reading requires a reader to zero in on the writing itself and to ask why and how it works. Prose compares the process to taking apart a machine to understand its components. When an engineer understands how each component works, they can more effectively put that machine together. Writers have always understood the importance of close reading. That said, while many writers achieve this dismantling and reconstruction of components through an organic osmosis, others, like Harry Crews, do it in a more methodical way. For example, “Harry Crews has described taking apart a Graham Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered, how Greene handled pacing, tone, and point of view” (8). Regardless of approach, Prose advocates for the importance of reading as a tool to learn creative writing.

The process of close reading is not uncritical. It requires an active mind. Prose states that reading a text word by word, line by line, encourages a reader to question the writer’s word choices. “One way to compel yourself to slow down and stop at every word is to ask yourself what sort of information each word—each word choice—is conveying” (22), she notes. Why does the narrative in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” refer to the maid Kate as “proud, young Kate, the enchanted princess”? In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” why does Flannery O’Connor refer to one protagonist as just “the grandmother,” but to the other, “Bailey,” by name? And how do these word choices tie into the larger narrative of the stories? By asking these questions, the reader begins to develop, over time, a keen sense of what works in writing. Prose also suggests paying close attention to the components of language, “since words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted” (23). These components of language are words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Studying why a sentence is beautiful, or how a paragraph break can add a new dimension to a story, is essential to understanding how language works in a narrative.

Prose also notes another reason that close reading is essential to a writer: reading attentively—and widely—shows a writer the possibilities of literature. Writing students are often given stock advice such as to “show, don’t tell” and to avoid long monologues in dialogue. While this advice can be useful, the more one reads, the more they realize that it is by no means universal. The short story expert Alice Munro, for example, often breaks the “show, don’t tell” rule in her stories. Similarly, the opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a single-sentence paragraph, which writing students are often told to avoid. Close reading shows a writing student that writing decisions should be dictated by the text’s internal logic, rather than just rules. To a writer struggling with rules or critiques, this knowledge can be immensely liberating. In addition to giving the writer the courage to trust their instincts over general rules of thumb, reading encourages the writer to pursue themes and narratives that defy propriety. The “beginning writer can count on being heartened by all the brave and original works that have been written without the slightest regard for how strange or risky they were, or for what the writer’s mother might have thought when she read them” (271). In other words, reading liberates a writer to write.