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Long before there were creativewriting workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes 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 Eliots Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery OConnor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. 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.
[...]... dazzling) strikes us as apt And the simile “rotted like water lilies” will come to seem increasingly applicable to much of what happens in a novel that is partly about the dissolution and decay of romance and beauty Students instructed to ransack The Great Gatsby for its narrator’s unreliability, for a historical portrait of a bygone era, and for a discussion of social class and the power of lost love. .. Hemingway says, “She had also discovered the truths about rhythms and the use of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.” In this characteristic passage from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas a passage, in fact, about Hemingway, and about sentences—we can see the origins of what Hemingway assimilated and adapted for his own use We recognize the familiar “rhythms... only far away but also up close, in order to see the brushstrokes heard the way a writer reads described as reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory... was being communicated, understood, misunderstood, said, and not being said Reading this way requires a certain amount of stamina, concentration, and patience But it also has its great rewards, among them the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist It’s something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing... a reading seminar for MFA students who wanted to be writers rather than scholars, which meant that it was all right for us to fritter away our time talking about books rather than politics or ideas AFTER I enjoyed the reading classes, and the opportunity to function as a sort of cheerleader for literature I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to... deploying metaphors, similes, and sharp turns of phrase that are the literary equivalent of a fireworks display But there are also writers whose vocabulary and whose approach to language is plain, spare, even Spartan THOUGH Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box Everything about her style is meant to attract no notice, to make you not pay attention But if you read her work... comparison to this section from West’s masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which she describes the moments leading up to the assassination of Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo: Princip heard the noise of Chabrinovitch’s bomb and thought the work was done, so stood still When the car went by and he saw that the royal party was still alive, he was dazed with astonishment and walked away to a. .. filled again, this time on the other side Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass It was all so slow and so controlled It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep He made four veronicas like that, and finished with a halfveronica that turned his back on the bull and came away toward... by many of my classmates and professors I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D program That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all... order, for a lost security and predictability, and a hint that this order will fail “our superordinary Swede.” Then comes the start of the brief, percussive declarative sentences and fragments A guy stacked like a deck of cards…In no way prepared…” Immediately the passage swings into a kind of call and response, an argument with itself, a series of questions and answers, or, more accurately, answers that . possibilities and its protest against the way that children are always being told exactly what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and what’s illusion. Perhaps my taste in reading had something. love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning. 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