A writer can spend years reading good books without learning much about how to write one. We may admire a novelist's sentences, feel completely absorbed by a story, or find ourselves thinking about a particular character long after finishing the book. But when we sit down to write, admiration offers little practical guidance. We know that something worked beautifully on the page. We're often much less certain about how the author accomplished it.
Learning to read like a writer requires a different kind of attention. It means becoming curious about the hundreds of small decisions that give a literary work its particular character. Why does a novelist introduce certain information immediately and withhold other details? Why does a chapter end in the middle of a conversation? What makes one character's voice so recognizable, even without dialogue tags? The more closely we examine such decisions, the more possibilities we begin to recognize in our own writing.
Take the opening of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an enormous insect-like creature. What is remarkable about the scene is how little astonishment Kafka permits his protagonist. Gregor is concerned about the discomfort of his new body, but he seems considerably more troubled by the prospect of arriving late to work. The absurdity of the situation emerges through the contrast between an impossible physical transformation and the ordinary anxieties of a traveling salesman. Kafka never pauses to explain why the transformation has occurred. He simply proceeds as though the reader must accept it.
For someone attempting to write a story with fantastic or surreal elements, this opening provides an extraordinary lesson. Kafka demonstrates how much a writer can accomplish through restraint, particularly when the subject matter is bizarre. Rather than telling readers how to respond to an impossible event, he allows the peculiar behavior of his characters to establish the story's emotional atmosphere.
Other books are useful for entirely different reasons. In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the reader's experience of time changes dramatically from one section to another. Woolf can devote pages to the passing thoughts of a character during an ordinary afternoon, then compress years into a relatively brief passage. Her handling of narrative time gives us something worth studying even if we have no intention of writing a novel resembling hers. We might begin to wonder why our own manuscripts give so much space to certain events while hurrying through others. Perhaps a scene we've spent weeks polishing would be more effective as a paragraph of summary. Perhaps an apparently insignificant moment deserves an entire chapter.
These are the kinds of discoveries that make close reading worthwhile. The lessons are seldom as simple as following a rule. A technique that succeeds brilliantly in one novel might be disastrous in another. What matters is learning to recognize the available choices, along with the artistic consequences of making them.
For developing writers, however, it can be difficult to know what to look for. The experience of reading a powerful story is often so seamless that its underlying construction remains hidden. A writing coach can help writers develop a more attentive and purposeful reading practice, particularly when they are struggling with specific aspects of their own manuscripts.
Suppose a novelist has written several chapters in which the dialogue feels stiff and overly explanatory. A writing coach might recommend stories by Raymond Carver, asking the writer to examine what his characters leave unsaid. The writer could then return to their manuscript and experiment with removing some of the information their characters have been made to communicate. Similarly, a writer struggling to manage several perspectives might study the shifting narration of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, paying attention to how a larger understanding of the story is gradually assembled from competing individual accounts.
A good coach can take the process further by designing exercises around these readings. A writer might be asked to rewrite a scene in the style of an admired author, reproduce the structure of a particular passage using entirely different material, or experiment with withholding information in the manner of a favorite story. Such exercises can initially feel artificial. Their purpose, however, is to make unfamiliar techniques available to the writer. Once we've attempted to construct something ourselves, we often return to the original work with a much better appreciation of its difficulties.
Imitation has always played a role in artistic education. Much like painters copying the work of earlier masters, writers have long learned by imitating the sentences of their predecessors. There is no reason to suppose that originality requires us to avoid such influences. In fact, a writer's individual style often develops through encounters with many different literary traditions, some of which may seem mutually incompatible.
Of course, no one wants to spend every evening dissecting paragraphs. Reading should remain a source of pleasure, and a writer who approaches every novel with a pencil and a list of technical questions may eventually find the experience exhausting. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is allow ourselves to become absorbed in a book, then return to a particularly memorable passage afterward to investigate what made it so effective.
The habit of reading like a writer develops gradually. At first, we may need to remind ourselves to notice how a scene is arranged or how a particular sentence achieves its rhythm. Eventually, this curiosity becomes second nature. We begin to recognize the enormous variety of solutions that literature offers to the problems of storytelling. And when we encounter difficulties in our own manuscripts, we have somewhere to turn: to the books that have challenged and delighted us, and to the generations of writers who confronted many of the same artistic questions before us.
