Read Like a Writer: The Basics
On switching gears from reading for fun (or reading for work!) to reading like a writer
When I first set out to write fiction a few years ago, I had one thing going for me: I was a reader. Probably the first bit of advice that established writers give to beginner writers is: you must read! Here’s Stephen King: “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” And Margaret Atwood: “It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.” And Haruki Murakami: “I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial.”
OK, cool! I like to read novels! So I should be able to write them, right? These cross-stitched-on-a-pillow quotes rarely get to the heart of how your reading actually helps you to write, or how to be strategic in your reading as a writer. The logic seems to be: if you read a lot, you know how books work, so now you can go do a book! Go do it!
Ah, if only it were that easy.
There are many reasons that people read. We read for learning. We read for pleasure. We read to understand who we are as humans. (I would argue this is what I was trying—and usually failing—to do with my English PhD.) Sometimes, we read to hate. We read to fortify ourselves for and against the world.1
If you’re a writer, you also read to learn how to write, to see how others have chosen to go about this journey you’re about to embark upon. But how does one do that, exactly? I’m writing this partly to educate myself, to articulate a process that often happens implicitly. You read all those great writers in the first paragraph; you have to read in order to write! But how do you that? Here’s one approach.
Reading Like a Writer: HGTV Edition
Okay, here’s the way I think about reading like a writer. Consider the book you’re reading as if it were a house you might want to buy. You need to inspect the house in several different ways; you want to pay attention to the little details and the big picture. For an example, I’ll use the last novel I finished, Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place. Here are the levels of a book that I consider when reading like a writer:
ONE: Micro Level
You walk into the house and at first you might be overwhelmed with little things: Paint colors. Types of cabinets. Carpet vs. bare floors. When it comes to a book, the micro level happens on the level of the sentence. Here’s how This Must Be the Place begins:
There is a man.
He’s standing on the back step, rolling a cigarette. The day is typically unstable, the garden lush and shining, the branches weighty with still-falling rain.
There is a man and the man is me.
I am at the back door, tobacco tin in hand, and I am watching something in the trees, a figure, standing at the perimeter of the garden, where the aspens crowd in at the fence. Another man.
A bird-watcher, I am telling myself as I pull the frail paper along my tongue, you get them in these parts. But at the same time I’m thinking, Really? Bird-watching, this far up the valley? I’m also thinking, Where is my daughter, the baby, my wife? How quickly could I reach them, if I needed to?
This book begins with a (deceptively?) simple declarative sentence: “There is a man.” This sentence is in the present tense; it introduces a tension (who is this man?) that is then resolved (“the man is me”), but soon replaced with another tension (“Another man.”). The sentences are fairly short and heavy on the first-person pronoun (I am doing this, I am doing that), though moments of descriptiveness break in (“the branches weighty with still-falling in rain”). The tone of these sentences is rather ominous. The tension they introduce (who is this man?) is underscored by the imagery of the “unstable” day, the “still-falling” rain, the aspens “crowd[ing] in at the fence,” the “frail paper” of the cigarette. All is not well here.
Now, here’s an example from a different text:
If you were to stand at the window in Hewlands and crane your neck sideways, it would be possible to see the edge of the forest.
You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather's ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour; bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it.
On a morning in early spring, fifteen years or so before Hamnet runs to the house of the physician, a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear: He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting, that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone, that they are now on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.
These paragraphs are from Hamnet, the book that O’Farrell wrote after This Must Be the Place. TMBTP is contemporary literary fiction; Hamnet is historical fiction (see #3). The language (also called word choice or diction), therefore, is different here. The words are floofier, for lack of a better term. Less plain. (See “restless, verdant, inconstant” and “caresses, ruffles, disturbs.”) The connection of the trees with the “backdrop of a theatre” let’s us know a bit of what’s to come; this Latin tutor is in fact William Shakespeare. (A cool thing O’Farrell does is never mention Shakespeare by name. This is also a choice that takes place on the sentence level that speaks to the book’s overall themes—the book is focused on Anne Hathaway/Hamnet rather than WS, and it’s almost as if naming him would overshadow everything else that’s going on. This is also WS before he was THE WS, so not naming him gestures to his lack of fame.) The sentences in the passage are longer, more flowing, more clogged with clauses than in the first example. I think that’s because language functions differently in Hamnet. It’s telling the story of arguably the greatest wordsmith in English, and it’s also set 400 years ago. (I’ve read that O’Farrell made sure that every word she used in Hamnet existed in English at Shakespeare’s time.) In TMBTP, the sentences are staccato, direct, even alarmed. The protagonist is, like Shakespeare, interested in words; he’s a linguist, we learn later in the chapter. The shape of these individual sentences tells us lots about the characters we’re encountering and the spaces in time and place they inhabit.
Another feature to pay attention to at the micro level is how the author balances narration and dialogue. There’s quite a lot of dialogue in TMBTP, and much less in Hamnet. Partly this may be due to the desire to avoid Ye Olde Timey English, but also, some books are just more talky than others. Notice how your writer handles dialogue, when she summarizes speech rather than quoting directly, what speech markers she uses (this is an extremely hot topic in writing circles, and many of us have been scarred by what Stephen King says about adverbs), how she deals with accents, etc. Think about your own preferences—do you like a talky book or prefer more narration than dialogue—and think about what approach suits the book you’re writing.
TWO: Structural Level
The second level of house inspection involves thinking about structure. How is this house put together? What are its constituent parts and and how are they achieved? How many stories does it have, how many bedrooms, what’s the square footage?
This level of reading involves noticing the substructure of the book. This Must Be the Place is comprised of 28 chapters, each of which begins something like this:
O’Farrell gives us a chapter title (which in this case is a telling phrase from within the chapter), a character name, and a setting in time and place. Across the 28 chapters, the book skips forward and backward in time (from the 1980s through 2016) and place (from Ireland to China to California to Brooklyn and more!). Every chapter also shifts in point of view. We begin, in those lines I quoted earlier, in Daniel’s first-person perspective, but there are also chapters from the perspective of Daniel’s wife Claudette (told in 3rd person focalized through her) and their children and some even more tangential characters. (At one point, near the end of the book, we get a chapter from the perspective of a character we have never met before and will never meet again! WILD.)
Now, a caveat: most of us writers are not as, shall we say, experimental as O’Farrell when it comes to timelines and perspectives. This Must Be the Place is, by my count, O’Farrell’s seventh published novel. If you’re a newbie fiction writer, like I am, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going for this high level of play with structure. Still, it’s cool to read a book like this and see if it works for you. After all, when you’re looking at real estate, you get a sense of not just what you like but also, and perhaps more importantly, what you don’t like. If a book with this much structural experimentation doesn’t work for you as a reader, you don’t have to write it as a writer!
The first book I wrote has a straightforward timeline set over a few months and a third-person narration that’s focused through the main character. Third person seems to come more naturally to me than first person, but the focalization definitely took some practice. While I was writing, I would find my narration wandering into the thoughts of other characters, and I’d have to rein it back in and figure out how to convey another character’s thoughts/motivations using only the headspace of my MC.
Organizational methods like chapters, section breaks, parts, etc., also come into reading for structure. Each time you finish a chapter, think: what did this chapter accomplish? What tensions did it set up and what tensions are still unresolved? Chapters, like rooms, have specific purposes: think about why the author chose to begin and end their chapter where they did.
THREE: Macro Level
All right, you’ve inspected this house up close and in terms of its bones, its structure. Now it’s time to zoom out all the way and think about the house on the macro level. What type of house is this house architecturally? What neighborhood is the house in? Who else lives in houses like this?
Reading like a writer on the macro level means thinking beyond the single book in your hands, and considering its placement within an author’s career and within book publishing more generally. How do you do this? Start by looking at the book’s paratexts: Acknowledgements are probably my favorite place to begin. Inevitably, within the acknowledgements, you will get a sense of how this author created this book and who’s responsible for getting this book out into the world. You will hopefully find the name of their agent (which is super helpful if you’re querying and looking for agents who rep your genre) and their editor. You might find the names of fellowships or retreats or ways their writing has been supported.
Next, read the book’s blurb, and look closely at the front/back covers, quotations of “praise,” etc. How is it being marketed? Interestingly, my copy of This Must Be the Place is marketed as by the “bestselling author of HAMNET,” which tells me that this is a fairly new edition, because Hamnet was published in 2020 and became O’Farrell’s breakout book. Before Hamnet, O’Farrell was a well-respected novelist (she’d won a slew of Costa Book Awards, which are for good books that people actually enjoy reading) who, as I said before, had churned out something like eight novels and one memoir in roughly two decades. But Hamnet was a smash. It won the Woman’s Prize and a bunch of other awards and is even now being turned into a movie starring my boyfriend and yours Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and being directed by Chloé Zhao.
I take several lessons from all this: 1) Maggie O’Farrell’s writing talent has always been recognized, but it took her 20 years to write a bona fide smash that made her into a household name. Hang in there and keep doing your thing; you never know when you’ll break through. 2) Hamnet was a diversion for O’Farrell. I’d assumed she’d always written historical fiction (because her two most recent books are historical fiction), but her previous eight novels were mostly contemporary literary fiction, though her books often juxtaposed a past timeline with a present one. Writers change course sometimes. 3) Part of why I suspect Hamnet broke through in 2020 was because it was a plague novel published during a pandemic. But O’Farrell presumably started writing the novel in 2017 or 2018, meaning that she had no idea what was come. You can’t predict trends or know when a book will hit. All you can do is pursue an idea that you love.
Within this level of reading like a writer, I like to think about the book’s title and its cover. As I said, these macro elements aren’t always within a writer’s control, but they do help a would-be writer learn about the business of publishing and the ways that authors have cultivated careers. They make you savvy to trends, even if you can’t control them. In the US market, Maggie O’Farrell’s back catalogue got a whole new set of covers making them all look similar and promoting them as by the “bestselling author of HAMNET.” Again, this shows how a writing career is built over time and not overnight.
Finally, if I really, really love a book or author, I’d recommend seeking out interviews with them to learn more about their writing process. I’ll go to my podcast app and type their name in to see if I can find any good interviews there, or I’ll look for written interviews like this one with O’Farrell. You’ll get insight into their process and answers to some of the questions you may have about the choices they make in their books.
Phew! That’s a lot to think about, and it only just scratched the surface. But when you read with some of these thoughts in mind, you eventually get a sense of both how a particular novel was constructed and whether you yourself would like to write that kind of novel. You learn the cadence of good sentences and the feel of sound structures. You figure out the rules of certain genres, and you figure out if you’d like to break some of them in your own writing. Now, just because you understand what a house is and what kind of house you like and what neighborhood you’d like to build a house in doesn’t mean that you can go off and build your own house right away. But it does give you the tools to not build, say, a spaceship. And with a lot of trial and error, you can hopefully someday build a house of your own.
Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be using this newsletter to spotlight some of my favorite books/writers, both classic and contemporary, and I’ll be doing deep dives into how they and why they work and lessons that other writers can glean from them. There are lots of resources out there to get the most out of your reading if you’re also learning to write. One of my favorites in Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer. (Step One: Have an awesome writerly last name like “Prose.”) And if you have any tips on how you read like a writer, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Thanks for reading this edition of The Booklight. I’ll be back soon with more thoughts on writing, literature, history, publishing, and more. Until we meet again, here’s an extremely lovely London poem to make you smile. xo Jill
I should note that many of these reasons for reading can overlap and occur simultaneously. Just because I’m reading to learn things about writing doesn’t mean that I’m also not reading for pleasure.