Reading Like a Writer A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them Books to Be Read Immediately Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. M. Kuwata and Tashaki Kojima (translators), Rashomon and Other Stories Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women Anonymous. Dorothy L. Sayers (translator), The Song of Roland Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility Babel, Isaac. Walter Morrison (translator), The Collected Stories Baldwin, James, Vintage Baldwin Balzac, Honere de. Kathleen Raine (translator), Cousin Bette Barthelme, Donald, Sixty Stories Brodkey, Harold, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Baxter, Charles, Believers: A Novella and Stories Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 Bowen, Elizabeth, The House in Paris Bowles, Jane, Two Serious Ladies Bowles, Paul, Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights Calvino, Italo, Cosmicomics Carver, Raymond, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories Carver, Raymond, Cathedral Cervantes, Miguel De. Tobias Smollett (translator), Don Quixote Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever Chekhov, Anton.Constance Garnett (translator), A Life in Letters Chekhov, Anton. Constance Garnett (translator), Tales Of Anton Chekhov: Volumes 1-13 Diaz, Junot, Drown Dickens, Charles, Bleak House Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Constance Garnett (translator), Crime and Punishment Dybek, Stuart, I Sailed With Magellan Eisenberg, Deborah, The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg Eliot, Georg, Middlemarch Elkin, Stanley, Searches and Seizures Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender is the Night Flaubert, Gustave.Geoffrey Wall (translator), Madame Bovary Flaubert, Gustave. Robert Baldick (translator), A Sentimental Education Fox, Paula. Jonathan Franzen (introduction), Desperate Characters Franzen, Jonathan, The Corrections Gallant, Mavis, Paris Stories Gaddis, William, The Recognitions Gates, David, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gogol, Nikolai. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (translators), Dead Souls: A Novel Green, Henry, Doting Green, Henry, Loving Hartley, L.P., The Go-Between Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises Herbert, Zbigniew, Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (translators), Selected Poems James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw Jarrell, Randall, Pictures From an Institution Johnson, Denis, Angels Johnson, Denis, Jesus's Son Johnson, Diane, Le Divorce Johnson, Diane, Persian Nights Johnson, Samuel, The Life of Savage Joyce, James, Dubliners Kafka, Franz. Malcolm Pasley (translator), The Judgment and In the Penal Colony Kafka, Franz. Malcolm Pasley (translator), Metamorphosis and Other Stories Kafka, Franz. Willa and Edmund Muir (translator), The Trial Le Carre, John, A Perfect Spy (New York: Bantam, 1986). Mandelstam, Nadezdha, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir Mansfield, Katherine, Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Gregory Rabassa (translator), One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Gregory Rabassa (translator), The Autumn of the Patriarch McInerney, Jay, Bright Lights, Big City Melville, Herman, Bartleby and Benito Cereno Melville, Herman, Moby Dick Milton, John, Paradise Lost Munro, Alice, Selected Stories Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita O'Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories O'Connor, Flannery. Collected Stories O'Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood Packer, ZZ, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Paustovsky, Konstantin. Joseph Barnes (translator), Years of Hope: The Story of A Life. Price, Richard, Freedomland Proust, Marcel.D.J. Enright (translator), Swann's Way Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow Richardson, Samuel, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded Rossellini, Isabella, Some of Me Roth, Philip, American Pastoral Roth, Philip, Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962 Rulfo, Juan, Margaret Sayers Peden (translator), Pedro Paramo Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey Shakespeare, William, King Lear Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante's Handbook Sophocles. Sir George Young (translator), Oedipus Rex Spencer, Scott, A Ship Made of Paper St. Aubyn, Edward, Mother's Milk St. Aubyn, Edward, Some Hope: A Trilogy Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas Stendhal. Roger Gard (translator), The Red and the Black Stout, Rex, Plot it Yourself Strunk, William and White, E.B.. Maria Kalman (Illustrator), The Elements of Style, Illustrated Taylor, Peter, A Summons to Memphis Tolstaya, Tatyana, Sleepwalker in a Fog Tolstoy, Leo. Constance Garnett (translator), Anna Karenina Tolstoy, Leo. Aylmer Maude (translator), The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories Tolstoy, Leo, David McDuff (translator), The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories Tolstoy, Leo. Rosemary Edmonds (translator), Resurrection (New York: Penguin, 1966). Tolstoy, Leo. Constance Garnett (trans). War and Peace (New York: Random House, 1994). Trevor, William, The Children of Dynmouth Trevor, William, The Collected Stories Trevor, William, Fools of Fortune Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich. Isaiah Berlin (translator), First Love Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Von Kleist, Heinrich. Martin Greenberg (translator) and Thomas Mann (preface), The Marquise of O- and Other Stories West, Rebecca, The Birds Fall Down West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia Williams, Joy, Escapes Woods, James, Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief Woolf, Virginia, On Being Ill Yates, Richard, Revolutionary Road Chapter One Close Reading Can creative writing be taught? It's a reasonable question, but no matter how often I've been asked, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can't be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost , or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don't believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he's a giant bug. What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that it's being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years. What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we'd spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time? Probably, I should just go ahead and admit that I've been committing criminal fraud. Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I took. This was in the 1970s, during my brief career as a graduate student in medieval English literature, when I was allowed the indulgence of taking one fiction class. Its generous teacher showed me, among other things, how to line edit my work. For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, or especially cut is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp. Meanwhile, my classmates were providing me with my first real audience. In that prehistory, before mass photocopying enabled students to distribute manuscripts in advance, we read our work aloud. That year, I was beginning what would become my first novel. And what made an important difference to me was the attention I felt in the room as the others listened. I was encouraged by their eagerness to hear more. That's the experience I describe, the answer I give people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you. But that class, as helpful as it was, was not where I learned to write. Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books. Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be? Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal, methodical way—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—the truth is this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis. After I've written an essay in which I've quoted at length from great writers, so that I've had to copy out long passages of their work, I've noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent. In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls "putting every word on trial for its life": changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in. I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made. And though it's impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction. This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught. What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire. And so the book that follows represents an effort to recall my own education as a novelist and to help the passionate reader and would-be writer understand how a writer reads. When I was a high school junior, our English teacher assigned us to write a term paper on the theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. We were supposed to go through the two tragedies and circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness, and vision, then draw some conclusion on which we would base our final essay. It all seemed so dull, so mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it. Without this tedious, time-consuming exercise, all of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas. Still, we liked our English teacher, we wanted to please him. And searching for every . . . Reading Like a Writer A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them . Copyright © by Francine Prose. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
