Ten Tips for Reading Like a Writer

And why reading can transform your writing

It’s a truism of writing that you can’t write what you don’t read – but for every thousand tutors, agents, editors and authors who answer the question ‘How do I become an author?’ by saying ‘Read, read, READ’, only a handful will then explain how, exactly, you should do that.

We were all readers before we were writers, of course. And having studied literature can help - but it can hinder, because reading like a writer is not the same as reading for your English Lit class: the text is not a puzzle of meaning, not a piece in the jigsaw of history and culture, which you must understand, dissect, discuss and assess.

On the other hand, if you want to improve your writing it’s not enough to read as we mostly did as children,* simply letting the story take you. That has trained your instincts, sure, and instinct can take you a long way: some fantastic storytellers operate largely on a vague ‘that doesn’t feel right’ plane and would say they have little conscious technical awareness.** But most of us write better – and all of us edit better – if we learn to recognise good tools and then how to use them. So here are some tips to help:

1. As you read, keep an ear pricked for how your reader-self is feeling. Liking or disliking the piece isn’t the point, specifics are what matter: that you find a character hilariously annoying, or a page describing the house rather spooky, or you’re confused about who did what to whom in the flashback.

2. When you notice one of these specific experiences, pause, and have a look at the passage that gave rise to that feeling. What words, phrases, sentence-shapes and punctuation have helped create it?

What you’re trying to understand is the causes of your own readerly reactions, and after that you may just want to keep reading.

But if you want to get into the nuts and bolts there and then, or come back later, these are all good questions to ask yourself:

• Showing/Evoking vs Telling/Informing. Which is the writer choosing to do? What words and phrases are making it feel that way? Why might they have made that choice at this point? Does it work? What would be the effect if they’d done the opposite? If they’re using figurative language, do the metaphors and similes enhance the effect or are they clichéd, mixed or inadvertently comical?

• Psychic distance: at the moment, are we close in to the character as an actor experiencing these events, thoughts and feelings, or further out and taking a wider view? What words are having that effect? Why has the writer made that choice?

• Point of View: Which heads do we get inside? Why might the writer have made those choices? Do they work? What would be the effect of different choices? If the PoV changes, how does the writer handle that?

• How is the writer keeping me wanting to know what happens next? How is the writer keeping me caring about what happens to this character? Don’t forget: ‘caring’ can including wanting them to get their comeuppance!

• When the writer moves me around in time or place – from one scene to the next, in a flashback or chunk of backstory, or in a full-blown, non-linear narrative – how does the author handle those transitions? Do I get lost, confused or bored?

• Where there’s necessary information about the past or the context, how is the writer getting that in without it reading like a text book or guide book?

• Am I being led onwards with tasty and intriguing details – or am I noticing the writer witholding information from me, as when Sherlock Holmes picks up ‘certain small objects’ and Watson doesn’t tell us what these clues actually are. Or did I only later realise that there were clues there at all, the writer having hidden them plain sight?

• When the writer is writing about people very different from themself, does it feel comfortable and well-judged, or does it jar or feel wrong in an (un)ethical way? Is it the prose – the detail of the words – or the roles those characters have in the story, which is having that effect on you?

And finally, some book recommendations, and two extra thoughts (OK, that’s Twelve Tips, I know!) Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is the best book I know on this topic, though David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction is also a cracker, and Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is a great, inspiring beast of a book for both writers and readers.

• Learning to reading like a writer is central to developing your writing – but that’s not to say that ‘reading like a reader’ is something you (should) grow out of. (Anyway, no shoulds on the Itch!) A crucial part of revising and editing is finding ways to read your writing like a reader: staying immersed, logging things which jar, but not trying to solve them, yet.

• If you find yourself concluding crossly that this is a really bad book, it’s well worth thinking about it, instead, as a good book, and asking yourself why a publisher thought there were enough readers who’d buy it. Is there anything you could learn from that, to apply to your own writing?

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* Having said that, the first writing technique I remember absolutely and specifically noticing was in reading Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, aged about 8, and the second in reading Rumer Godden’s Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, only a little older.

** I well remember Michael Caine saying firmly in a TV interview, ‘I’m an instinctive actor, I do it all by instinct,’ and then barrelling into a super-technical explanation of how when he’s in a close-up on camera, aiming dialogue at an actor off-camera, he learnt to set his shoulders, feet and face at the precise angle to allow the eye nearest the camera to be the one engaging with the nearer eye of the off-camera actor … At least, I think that’s what he was explaining.

And I thought, ‘If that’s ‘instinctive’ acting, what on earth does he call ‘technical’ acting?!’ Our culture values tropes of inspiration and genius over craft and sweat, so when a writer sits on a platform and talks about how instinctive a writer they are, it’s wise to take that with a pinch of salt. That is, unless you can some day sit down with them, and ask why and how they wrote each line of a particular chapter - and get an answer.

Image credit: Sofia Livarinen at Pixabay.