Reading As a Writer, Part One
Dear Reader,
I’ll have a few of these, as I find good pieces and as I decide to play with the theme more. But as they say, there’s no time like the present. So let’s get started.
I’m quite uncomfortable with this topic, to be honest. It’s one thing to have the audacity to write on the reading life. That’s already contentious territory. One that in a certain sense no one is fully qualified to write on. In another sense, it’s territory that is typically restricted to the academic class or those who’ve spent a career on such labors. Often it’s both. The rest of reading-wisdom sharers tend to be tech-boy blowhards.
Thus, I have a genuine fear of my labors, however much I may make steady claim to them. (I’m keenly aware that I started this series before my research was finished, a haste precipitated only by the thinking that these essays might serve better purpose now than in five years.)
Few topics for this newsletter have given me as much pause as reading as a writer. This is for simple reason: I don’t consider myself a writer. To write about reading as a writer feels fraudulent. I am neither a technician nor a craftsman. Whether I like it or not, though, I do write. (I don’t like it.) And so I will include a few of my own thoughts on the matter. Even more, however, my hope is to share the thoughts of others, those more equipped to offer useful or interesting scope on reading as a writer. That way, your understanding of the topic won’t be constrained by my limitations. (Once again, those who can do, teach. So I’ll try to make certain I place you in the hands of capable teachers, because I’m not equipped to teach this area.)
Recently, I found myself reading as a writer in a most uncomfortable manner. For absolutely no good reason whatsoever, outside shenanigans, I decided to rope together a group of friends—none of them mutual to each other—into a writing adventure for the month of November. We would each write a short story of children’s fantasy for Cricket Magazine. For the real writers in the group, it was an opportunity to stretch themselves and possibly get in front of agents. For me, well, as ringleader I was obliged to participate.
(One tiny writing note: there is a school of thought that says that if you write in genres in which you have no dexterity or familiarity, that you will strengthen those areas of your writing where you are more comfortable. Since Cicero wrote wretched poetry but symphonious prose, we’ll grant that hypothesis the status of a presumptive defeasible generalization. My only reason for participation was that my stories would be analogous to Cicero’s poetry…)
I don’t write fiction. I last tried in maybe third grade, simply taking the L in later grades when teachers tried assigning me writing stories for class. My fiction was terrible. There are those gifted kids who you know just love to write. I’ve never been that kid, and I was even less so that kid when it came to fiction. There’s even a joke in my family about how I regularly forced my sister to tell me stories and I’d never participate or help with the story. (I was kind of the worst.)
So when I decided to motivate my friends, which is more or less what was the inciting event, I had a problem. I had to write fiction. And it had to be good enough that they couldn’t accuse me of not trying. And so off I went to my local library, and I read issue after issue of Cricket Magazine. And I looked at the types of stories. I looked at the length of the stories. And instead of reading them as stories, though I did that, I tried to notice how they began, how they ended, how the action moved along. Though I’m not typically a big scenery reader—I’m much improved in appreciating this, but get me to the action more times than not—I had to observe things like descriptions of landscape and pottery and cottages. These are all odds and ends that you only have to worry about as a regular reader if you have a teacher who’s obsessed with these details and they appear on tests. In no other setting are you expected to account for the various and sundry details, unless you like them or… you’re reading as a writer.
(For those wondering, my friends found my story tolerable; my nieces and nephews loved it; and Cricket Magazine told me it wasn’t me, it was them. Oh, and my friends wrote some awesome stories, so it was worth the endeavor.)
Keeping with the fiction theme, I’ll turn us over to more expert hands. Brian Phillips is a writer for The Ringer who does some regularly decent work. And recently, perhaps because he’s handling masters, he’s writing on a level I can barely grasp. Often when writers write about a master, they start to sound like a knockoff sportscaster, like someone trying for Bob Uecker’s avuncular style without his voice and pacing.
Phillips isn’t messing around with that. He’s in a regular voice, one I wouldn’t mistake for a faked “higher register.” And he’s mostly getting out of the way of his prose. He explains some super thorny literary details, the kind that make college freshmen the world over take a nap (even more so when it’s a Zoom lecture), and he gets at them in a casual, interesting style. Normally when someone starts gushing about another writer’s genius, you either take a mental nap or think, “oh yeah?!” There’s either apathy or disbelief.
Those are practically my default settings when people start gushing about writers. First, I just don’t care. Second, they’re probably overstating matters. And Phillips might be. To my read, however, he isn’t. And how he frames Hilary Mantel’s recent book The Mirror and the Light is surprisingly light and deep. I’ll leave you with this one segment where you’ll see that he’s precisely on this beat as a writer and leave the rest of his piece to you:
What I want to talk about here, though, is not so much Mantel’s life and career, or even the dramatic-historic arc of the Cromwell trilogy, as gripping as it is. What I want to talk about is something closer to technique. That is, I want to talk about Mantel’s method of representing setting and human consciousness. Specifically, I want to talk about why, if you are a writer and read her work, you might feel, at regular intervals, a sensation of awe so intense that your brain loses contact with the nerve endings in your face.
If you want to experience reading as a writer, go read Phillips. (In fact, he followed up that piece with an absolute monster on Susanna Clarke’s work. This second exquisite piece must absolutely not be read unless you’ve already read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The biggest reason for this restriction is that Phillips fails where all mortals must fail: summarizing Clarke’s masterpiece. And that failure doesn’t condemn his piece, but it would so deeply impoverish your read that I must implore you to read Clarke before seeing his review. What Phillips captures is the essence of her uncanny aether. If you’ve read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, then you can find delight in Phillips’ celebration of her craft. This is Clarke: “So Clarke’s second novel arrives like a magical text out of the plot of her first: a tome from nowhere, written by a vanished legend, apparently containing an intricate puzzle, and appearing, as if by magic, to mesmerize the world.” If you’ve read Clarke, this line should drip saccharine, and yet it doesn’t because the words are matched by her mastery.)
I realize that I frequently suggest linked pieces to you. I don’t, however, suggest too many like Phillips’s, ones that demonstrate a type of reading that I myself cannot simply measure up to. While I’ve gotten better at reading as a writer, it’s not my natural habitat, especially with fiction. Observe his work with Mantel’s book, and you’ll get it.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. If you’d like to see a book critic on reading as a book critic might, try this short interview. The particular nugget of gold inside is that she differentiates between “normal” reading and reading as a critic.
P.P.S. Wondering where the “how to read books on writing” section was? That’s a totally separate type of read! It’s also a read almost everyone does at some point. But yes, I hope to attend to it someday. I might as well—my personal library has near a hundred titles on writing.