How to Read to Elevate Your Writing Practice

Today’s post is by book coach Robin Henry.

Writers are frequently advised to read more to improve their writing. The problem is, no one seems to tell them how to use reading to elevate their writing practice. Reading alone is not enough—osmosis is not a viable strategy for learning.

You’ll find books on this topic, such as Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer and How to Read Like a Writer by Erin Pushman, but they tend to take a generalist approach. They are usually aimed at beginning writers, and contain reading lists that would lay even an enthusiastic graduate student low. Classic literature is great (mostly)—I am a fan! But to write a book that will be a work of art and have a chance of succeeding in the modern marketplace, I suggest writers focus on more recent fiction for their writerly reading.

How to choose books for mentor texts

The first hurdle is choosing which books to use as your mentor texts. Selecting books can be challenging in the modern world, not least because we are spoiled for choice. Hundreds of books are published every year, and writers need criteria to craft their reading lists. Fortunately, as a librarian trained in collection development, I can help.

Read professional reviews rather than those on Amazon or Goodreads. They don’t have to be from the literary establishment (New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, the Guardian), but they do need to be written by professionals, because you want to know that the books have been analyzed with some attention to plot, tone, character development, language, etc. Choosing books that have been professionally reviewed by at least two sources narrows the universe of books to a manageable number. “Best of” lists and literary prize lists are great places to find books to read, too. They usually include annotations, which can be helpful. Consider NPR, Booklist (the librarian’s favorite), Library Journal, librarian/library blogs, and literary podcasts.

After deciding which review sources or lists you will use, consider genre. Try to select a mix of genres, including the one you write in. One of the best ways to give yourself the distance you need to analyze books is to read outside your usual genre. You will see new ways of writing, as well as different kinds of plots and characters, which serve to feed the imagination. Try adding a little non-fiction, too. Human brains are great at seeing patterns, and varying the field in which one’s brain is searching will help bring novelty to your novel.

Finally, check your newly minted TBR pile for diversity. If you’ve skewed in a particular direction, consider going back to your review sources and seeing what other titles might take your fancy that are not in that demographic—either author or character-wise. Look for international books. Americans especially have a tendency to select American-centric titles. Branch out. NPR’s Books We Love and the international Booker Prize contain books from other countries, either written originally in English or translated.

Questions to keep in mind while you are reading

Now that you’ve selected the book(s) you want to read, you are ready to think about a framework to use as you read. It is important to have questions in mind beforehand so that you know what to pay attention to.

In The Well Educated Mind, Susan Bauer suggests that one way to get at the deeper meaning of a book is to ask yourself, “What is the message the author is trying to convey, and do I agree with it?” By analyzing your own response, you will consider reader response versus author intent and how both affect the overall effect of a novel. What readers think the author intended may be different to the message a reader takes from the book. Often the most effective way to convey a message is through questions that the reader asks themselves about the novel. These may be big picture, story questions about human nature, or they may be plot-level questions. The best novels use both.

For example, in the novel I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, there are many questions the reader could choose to focus on. However, if I consider the author’s intent, I land here:

1. (Story) How does society’s fascination with true crime reduce victims, especially women, to disposable people and wreak havoc on the lives of suspects, who may or may not be guilty, during the course of an investigation?
2. (Plot) Who really murdered Thalia?

The message she sends to me as a reader regarding the story question is that we make victims into girls who never had a chance, so that we can live with the fact that they were harmed. We reduce victims to disposable by blaming them or by arguing that it was fate. We justify the harm done during an investigation as collateral damage in the quest for justice, when in fact, there is no justice. On the plot level, you will know who the real murderer is by the end.

Other questions to ask about a book before you begin reading include nuts and bolts kinds of questions:

• What are the basic “facts” of the book?
  • Genre
  • Characters—who is the central character?
  • Basic plot events and turning points—what is the most important event/decision point?
• Character arc
  • What does the main character want?What stands in her way? (interior and exterior)
  • What does she do to overcome this obstacle?
• What POV does the writer use?
• What is the beginning and the end—is there change over time?

Finally, choose a few passages you find particularly beautiful and analyze them. Notice the rhythm, word choice, metaphors. What do they teach you about language use? What about the author’s writing did you find particularly enjoyable? Or not? Make notes to inform your own writing. When you see a word or an image you like, write it down so you can ponder it. Writing is a process, and it takes time to internalize the lessons you glean from the beautiful novels you read.

Close reading versus reading for enjoyment

As a former school librarian, I have spent hours in workshops about the different stages of reading enjoyment. “Stages of Growth in Literary Appreciation” by Margaret J. Early is from 1960, but modern scholarship has not altered her basic thesis. There are three stages in reading/literature appreciation. Most people read in all three of them and move between them. When we reach for a summer beach read, we are probably in Unconscious Enjoyment. We know we like it, but are not concerned with why we like it. When we reach for a thriller or a mystery, we are most likely in Self-Conscious Appreciation. We like it and we do care why. We care that the plot makes sense, that the characters are acting in ways that are logical in the story world. When we go looking for literary or upmarket fiction, we are usually reading in Conscious Delight. We know it will take some effort to read this book, but we also anticipate that it will be worth it. We want to think about big questions concerning humanity, we want to be asked to use our analytical powers to understand it. The reward is the experience of reading a deeply beautiful book.

The best writers write for all three stages, because readers come from all of them, and on any given day, they may slide to a different stage. Thus the rise of book club or upmarket fiction and genre fiction by literary writers. If you want your work to have lasting appeal, you will want to keep readers in mind and make it possible for them to enjoy the book no matter where they are. However, when you are reading like a writer, you must be in Conscious Delight. You must understand what you are reading and why; you need to be prepared to analyze it in order to apply the skills you see.

Annotating is one of the best ways to engage with a text. Unfortunately, many readers have been discouraged from writing in books. While you should not write in books you don’t own, annotating your personal copy is completely fine, and in fact I encourage it. Lest you think I am leading you down the garden path, historians study the marginalia in books for clues about what readers are thinking as they read. H. J.  Jackson has written several fine academic books about this, including Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books and Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia. Give the future literary critics something to think about when your library is turned into an archive. Write in your books.

Take notes and flag places where you notice the answers to questions in the framework. Notice where the turning points of the story are. Read again and see if you notice foreshadowing on the second read that you missed the first time. Reading like a writer is a commitment, which is why you choose the books carefully.

Interrogate the text: How does it work to create emotion? How does the language sit with you? How does the writer achieve a spectacular plot twist or something else unexpected? Make notes and think about how it was done. Did an image or a small piece of interiority click with you? Did a choice of verb leap from the page? Make a note.

Apply the lessons to your own work

When thinking about how to apply what you learn, take it one layer at a time.

1. Start with the message. What is your intended message to the reader? Do you have it in mind as you write? How do the characters’ choices reflect the message?
2. Next, go to the plot events and character development questions in the framework. Do you see the obstacles (interior and exterior) in your own story? Does your story have the genre markers you see in other works? Does it have the basic plot elements you notice in the books you read?
3. Think about point of view. Are the POV choices you have made the best ones to tell your story? What happens if you retell it from another POV—what changes? Who is narrating the story and how does the narrator’s voice impact the story? When you consider the narrators of the books you have read, what do you notice? How does the telling change with who tells the story?
4. What is the change in characters over time? Be specific. For example, in I Have Some Questions for You, the narrator begins the tale as an unreliable narrator and the main character, but over time, she becomes more truthful and more confident as she uncovers the past, and by the end, she is completely honest with herself and the reader. How does your main character change over the course of the book?
5. Finally, think about language. A possibly apocryphal story about Gustave Flaubert relates that he sometimes worked for hours on a single sentence. Whether or not that is true, art takes time. Using language well is not the purple prose of overwriting, but the true beauty of choosing just the right word for just the right sentence—conveying meaning on more than one level.

If you embrace reading like a writer, it may ruin you for Unconscious Enjoyment, it’s true. The tradeoff is that it will open your eyes to the world of how to craft a beautiful and meaningful novel and how to appreciate on a deep level the skill that the art of writing well demands.

Robin Henry

Robin Henry is a retired school librarian and Author Accelerator Certified Book Coach with an MLS (Library Science) and MA in Humanities. She has previously served on book award committees and as a writing contest judge for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. In addition to her work as a writing coach, she serves as the short story acquisitions editor for History Through Fiction, a small press that specializes in historical fiction. She is a fan of the Oxford comma, hot beverages, and historical fiction. Find her at readerly.net.