Reading Like a Writer
Long before there were creative-writing 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 Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor 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.
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What Hacker News says
- You can do it! https://writeofpassage.com/
In books about writing, I like:
How Fiction Works
Reading Like a Writer
Writing With Style
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/
- It varies. I have some writer friends (successful as in multiple books of fiction published, creative writing university teaching gigs, etc.) who don't read at all while they're writing others who do the opposite. I, personally, am always writing something and always reading something. I do need to be careful at times because there are writers with really strong voices who can overpower mine if I'm not conscientious (Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger have had that effect in the past).
I do keep lists of words and phrases, largely things that it occurs to me that this is the way to describe something I've been having trouble describing, but most of the time I'll keep working at a sentence until it says what I want the way I want it to.
But reading is absolutely essential, and reading to really understand the mechanics of how something works. Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer is a good introduction to how to do this.
- The following books below might be of help to you.
1. First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran - https://amzn.to/3m2Hq8N
2. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose - https://amzn.to/3dEXY3M
3. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King - https://amzn.to/3mfLFhF
In terms of technical content, there is a course for technical writers on pluralsight - https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/technical-writing-softwa...
