Reading Like a Writer

I want to read more non-fiction. Out of the nearly 100 books I read last year, one was non-fiction*. With a stat like that, I realize it will take effort to move the needle.

Luckily reading the devotional showed me the way I read non-fiction best. In small bites, early in the morning. Literally, the first thing I do when I get out of bed is read a page from whatever daily reader I am on and then a few pages of whatever non-fiction book I have chosen.

After reading On Writing by Stephen King**, I decided I wanted to get another perspective on writing and since I am a voracious reader***, this book seemed perfect.

While King and Prose both think Strunk and White is a great resource and adverbs should be avoided if possible, that is where the overlap of their approaches ends.

Prose starts with the smallest possible element – a word – and slowly expands out to sentences, paragraphs, dialog, details, and other areas, using examples from many great writers. If you are not a classic literature reader, you might have a hard time connecting with her examples. However, they also might show you why classics are classics and open the door to a whole new world to explore.

All of her advice is spot-on. I was especially reminded to slow down when reading. Just like in life, we miss so much when we don’t take the time to absorb all the details.

As is usual with these books, there is a list of books to read at the back of the book. King’s was all over the place and I loved that. Prose’s is definitely classic lit heavy which is unsurprising, given her own catalog of work and her obvious preference in her examples.

* Well, if you don’t count the devotional I finished this year which took 365 days to read.
** my non-fiction book from 2021
*** as if the 100 books in a year didn’t give that one away

Book summary (per Goodreads):

In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail. And, most important, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted.