I first read Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them a couple of years ago. When I came across it, I’d already struggled through writing three novels. By then, I’d put in enough work to have an opinion on things and enough experience to understand her opinions—most of which are excellent.
Prose’s book is my favorite kind of how-to: one that teaches through examples of things well done rather than a formulaic “Write a Bestseller in 42 Minutes!” kind of book. She starts with the most important skill a reader and a writer needs: the ability to read closely. She then spends the next several chapters starting at the smallest unit, the word, and gradually expanding.
The first time I read it, I found her anecdote about her high school assignment of circling references on page 4 to be amusing. However, on this read-through, I happened to be working on a paper on close reading, so I gave it an actual try. It worked better than I thought it would, but not as well as a normal analysis would have.
Chapter 5, “Narration,” is worth the price of the book alone. She begins by talking about how she “tricked” herself into writing her first novel by framing it as “stories within stories, narratives told by one character to another.” This is a good trick because it worked for her.
It’s not the only one, but any one that works is one worth having. I tricked myself by intentionally sitting down to write The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Ready Player One but set squarely on Earth and in Douglas Adams’s voice. It worked long enough for me to find my own narrative voice.
It’s an important matter for anyone who wants to be a writer, and Prose gives examples from so many different places that you can’t help but to start to get a feel for what might or might not work for you. Along the way, this reread reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the book, a couple of excerpts from Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t.” And then this, which hits even harder the second time around because I’ve started to think exactly this way in between my first and second reads a couple of years apart:
All of this should begin to give us an idea of the different options available when a writer is choosing to write a story from a particular point of view, or when, as more often seems to be the case, the story is choosing the point of view from which it wishes to be written.
Stories make choices. We’re just here to carry them out.
From the chapter on detail:
“We think in generalities,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead. “But we live in detail.” To which I would add: We remember in detail, we recognize in detail, we identify, we re-create—cops rarely ask eyewitnesses for general vague descriptions of the perpetrator.
The chapter on gesture is exquisite. She shares a masterstroke by Katherine Mansfield about a fly, and the chapter concludes with an incredible insight by Martin Scorsese that is both psychologically deep and a completely unexpected use of gesture.
Her series of stories from the chapter “Learning from Chekhov” is a powerful essay on how every rule of writing is correct—except for all the times it isn’t. In addition, this quotation from one of Chekhov’s letters is eternal:
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
I wasn’t expecting this book to be as fresh to me as it was the second time around. In the intervening time, I’d written a couple more novels, learned a lot more, and started to settle into what my style is. Or at least I thought I had, because my last couple have been serious departures from it… and I hope the word “departure” means “improvement.”
If you’re always getting better, that doesn’t mean your previous work was bad; it can mean you were good before and now you’re really good, or you were really good before and now you’re excellent. Even if it was bad, if you’ve gotten better, you’ve moved up to “not half bad” or “decent.” Although Prose doesn’t say this, it ties in with the chapter she concludes the book with, “Reading for Courage,” in which she gives an answer to why anyone would even want to write beautiful things when there is so much ugliness going on in the world. The book was written almost twenty years ago (2006), before social media toxicity and smartphones made everyone a critic no matter how meager their actual knowledge of the subject they’re giving a confidently wrong opinion on, and this chapter is even more relevant today than it was then.
I don’t often reread books, but Reading Like a Writer makes me wonder if I should. 10/10.
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