Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Reading Like a Writer (2006) is a nonfiction book by novelist and creative writing professor Francine Prose. Falling in the genre of a creative writing manual, the book offers writers and readers a new approach to improve their craft and enhance their understanding of literature. Prose’s central thesis is that attentive reading can open new doors into creativity for writers. Using her favorite literary masterpieces as guides, Prose shows writers how paying close attention to language can help answer difficult questions of craft and technique. Readers and writers can gain fresh perspective on how to create compelling characters and craft memorable dialogue. Quoting from masterpieces of classic and contemporary fiction, Prose narrates the book in a humorous, accessible style filled with personal observations and funny anecdotes. The book shows, through Prose’s own continuing study of writing, how writing is a skill that can be learned. In the process, it debunks many myths and rules about creativity and encourages writers to take chances in their writing.

As of late 2023, New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose (born in 1947) has written 18 works of fiction, including the National Book Award finalist novel Blue Angel (2000), Goldengrove (2008), and Household Saints (1981). An essayist, novelist, short story writer, translator, and creative writing professor, Prose describes herself as a compulsive reader since childhood. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1968, received an MA from Harvard in 1969, and published her first novel, Judah the Pious, in 1973. In 1991, she received a Guggenheim scholarship. Since the beginning of her writing career, Prose has also taught creative writing at several universities, including Sarah Lawrence, the University of Utah, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. A former Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose lives in New York City with her husband and has two sons.

This guide follows the HarperCollins e-books August 2006 edition.

Summary

In Reading Like a Writer, author and writing teacher Francine Prose distills the advice from her long career into actionable points for readers and writers. The guiding principle of Prose’s advice is that reading great works of literature closely is essential in learning how to write. To illustrate how close reading can change one’s writing style, and even one’s life, Prose analyzes components of language and narrative in excerpts from her favorite authors. She first establishes that close and slow reading is natural to people, since as children everyone imbibes language word by word. As people grow up, they tend to skim through words, rather than pay attention to them. To write better, readers must slow down and reacquaint themselves with their childhood attention to language.

Prose suggests applying close reading to powerful works of literary fiction in particular, since these tend to use language to build plot and character. One of the first steps of close reading is focusing on word choices in a text, examining why writers use the words they do. Once readers begin to ask these questions, they will see that the best writers make word choices that build the story’s themes and atmosphere. From words, Prose zooms out to the larger building blocks of language, such as sentences and paragraphs. She examines how writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth can all use the sentence beautifully, yet meaningfully. Prose shows how a beautiful sentence—no matter how long—is clear, informative, revelatory, and rhythmic. The arrangement of paragraphs can change the flow of a story. The best writers, like Isaac Babel, use paragraph shifts to introduce a fresh perspective, point of view, or time.

If sentences and paragraphs are the building blocks of any sustained piece of writing, then narration, character, dialogue, detail, and gesture are those specifically of a story. Prose notes that the question of narration—who should narrate a story and in which voice—often stumps a beginner writer. She argues that the best way to approach the problem may be to focus instead on who is listening to the story and why is the story being told. Once the writer has clarity on these points, the question of narrative voice tends to resolve itself. Making a character come alive on the page is a process that requires a series of crucial and specific word choices, though the writer’s approach to character itself may differ. Writers like Heinrich von Kleist build a character through the character’s actions alone, while Jane Austen also reveals the character’s thought process to animate them. To create unforgettable dialogue, Prose suggests ignoring the usual advice new writers receive on writing dialogue, namely to avoid mimicking real speech. Instead, she suggests observing the complex way in which humans interact, simultaneously revealing and concealing information, presenting different personas, and pushing agendas. The greatest writers, like Henry Green, utilize the complex nature of real human speech to create dialogue that furthers the plot.

Whether in creating unforgettable characters, sparkling dialogue, or believable stories, detail is of great importance. Prose examines the work of contrasting writers, such as the surrealist Franz Kafka and the realist Anton Chekov, to show how a well-placed, unique detail can make the reader suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in the fiction they are being told. Like a well-placed, careful detail, a gesture too can reveal fresh information about a situation, dynamic, or character. Prose advises the beginner writer to use gestures that are unique and meaningful, instead of stock gestures like clearing one’s throat or clenching a fist.

As much as close reading teaches a writer the craft of writing, it also teaches the courage to write. Writing is an act of courage, as it necessitates overcoming the fear of failure, exposure, and transgression. Reading shows the writer that others before them have fought the same battles and written nevertheless. Prose sums up her lessons on writing with the admission that no lesson is perfect; reading great works reveals that there are multiple approaches to creating fiction. Nonetheless, as a teacher of writing, she often gets asked to give her top definitive takeaway on how to craft fiction. To answer that question, she turns to her learnings from the work of Anton Chekov. The best advice she can give students is to admit that they know nothing, and then go out in the world and observe human nature in all its diversity.