Not all readers are writers, but I’ve never known a writer who wasn’t an avid reader as well. The two book selections for today highlight the intimate connection between these two activities, and specifically outline how careful, attentive reading can improve and inspire good writing.
“Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation.”
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
By Francine Prose
Every writer encounters the terrifying abyss of writers’ block. Every writer questions at some point – and some at many points – whether she has anything of value to add to the mountain of previously-published works. Every writer struggles on occasion to find inspiration. Every writer agonizes over honing his craft, changing an adjective here, moving this phrase to the beginning of the sentence or reordering the paragraphs, cutting, inserting, rewriting. In what can seem a very solitary endeavor, it’s comforting to know that we’re not alone.
The aptly named Ms. Prose, in her book Reading Like a Writer, mines the rich ore of historical literature for solutions to just about every problem writers face. Her basic premise is that different writers have different strengths; with all of the works of literature that have been around for hundreds of years, there’s bound to be something that will speak to your specific challenge as a writer. Even the great Dostoyevsky agonized over finding the right narrative voice for his psychological masterpiece Crime and Punishment. Do your sentences need some polish and sparkle? Pick up some Kafka, Steinbeck or Woolf and do some close word-by-word reading. Need some guidance or ideas on how to organize paragraphs more effectively? Compare and contrast the first few pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Ms. Prose points out that careful reading of certain works can be as valuable as a workshop or writers’ conference; George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for example, is a master class in creating a convincingly lifelike character with words.
Over and over, Ms. Prose recommends reading aloud both your own work and the classic literature she so highly esteems. Reading aloud reveals the rhythm and cadence of the language. It can also enhance the intensity of a passage as the words and momentum crescendo. Perhaps most importantly, reading aloud exposes weaknesses and clumsiness in our own word choice and phrasing: “Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent.”
In my favorite chapter, Ms. Prose discusses qualities of effective dialogue. While my writing is generally limited to opinion pieces and factual articles, I found myself wishing I wrote more fiction, just so I had a chance to try out some of her suggestions. She explains that “most conversations involve a sort of sophisticated multitasking,” and therefore, dialogue written to serve a single purpose, such as simply providing exposition, generally rings false. “Dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text,” she writes, “More is going on under the surface than on it.” Likewise, she says, “a good writer understands that characters not only speak differently depending on whom they are speaking to, but also listen differently depending on who is speaking.” Ms. Prose quotes liberally from dialogue-rich literature (everything from Henry Green’s Loving to Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies) to back up her assertions.
Despite the complaints of many a high school English student, “you can assume that if a writer’s work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so.” Ms. Prose leads her readers on a logically ordered, guided tour of just a few of those compelling reasons from a writer’s point of view. Even if writing is not your interest, Ms. Prose’s book will increase your ability to appreciate for the skill.
“Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences.”
How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
By Stanley Fish
Mr. Fish loves sentences. That much is obvious from the very beginning of his book. Early on, Mr. Fish declares, “Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers.” He writes as passionately and gleefully about sentences as my son recounts every particular of his Pokemon card deck. His fondness for these collections of words is infectious.
A sentence, as Mr. Fish defines it, is (1) “an organization of items in the world” and (2) “a structure of logical relationships.” From this rather vague and initially opaque explanation, Mr. Fish develops a method for both appreciating powerful sentences and creating them. Eschewing the standard practice of drilling students on prepositions or past participles (“You can know what the eight parts of speech are, and even be able to apply the labels correctly, and still not understand anything about the way a sentence works,” he claims), Mr. Fish first focuses on form. Form comes before content for the simple reason that “form, form, form, and only form is the road to what the classical theorists called ‘invention,’ the art of coming up with something to say.” To illustrate the preeminence of form before content, he uses the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
As any literate English reader knows, those words make absolutely no sense. Mr. Carroll provided no meaningful context here; however, the form provided is perfectly sufficient. The reader could easily replace the nonsensical words with ones that do create an intelligible sentence. In fact, mastering form first allows for greater creativity. “Creativity is often contrasted with forms to the latter’s detriment, but the truth is that forms are the engines of creativity.”
Once we can write a sentence with perfect form, the question becomes “what is a good sentence?” Here is where content comes in. “The end, the goal, the aspiration is to say something, and the something you want to say will be the measure of whether you have written a sentence that is not only coherent but good.” Again, Mr. Fish explains succinctly: “People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.” In other words, “The goal is not to be comprehensive…[but] to communicate forcefully whatever perspective or emphasis or hierarchy of concerns attaches to your present purposes.”
In keeping with the implications of its title, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One is an interactive book. Mr. Fish scatters several exercises throughout the first half of the book to engage the reader’s mind and pencil (or keyboard). Once the basic mechanics have been explained and experimented with by the reader, Mr. Fish moves on to appreciation. The later half of this slim volume focuses more on the finer points of enjoying sentences, specifically first sentences and last sentences, as well as other favorites of his.
Mr. Fish’s exuberance for language, especially well-crafted sentences, spills off of every page.
His writing made me more aware of areas in which I can improve as a writer and, better yet, provided some effective tools for improvement.
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On My Bedside Table…
Just finished: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
Now reading: The Family Virtues Guide: Simple Ways to Bring Out the Best in Our Children and Ourselves by Linda Kavelin Popov, Dan Popov, and John Kavelin
On deck: Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum (reading the series out loud with the kids)
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More on reading and writing next time! Come find me on goodreads.com or email suggestions, comments, and feedback to egeddesbooks (at) gmail (dot) com.
