Why readers should read like writers

Author Toni Morrison speaking on 50 years of Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' in February 2008. (Photo by Angela Radulescu via Wikimedia Commons 2.0)

Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer, says Toni Morrison in her Playing in the Dark. “Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty,” she goes on, “for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes”.

Both activities, then, require being mindful of how imagination asserts or sabotages itself. That is why most writers are readers first. Consciously or not, they look for the ways in which language and craft throw a net over the world.

This is evidently worthwhile for writers, but what about the rest of us garden-variety readers? What do we gain by reading like writers?

To begin with, as Francine Prose puts it in Reading Like A Writer, it shows how words are the raw material from which books are crafted. Close reading, she emphasises, reveals “the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint”.

An echo of this comes in the form of Gandhi’s observations when making editorial decisions for Indian Opinion in South Africa. As Isabel Hofmeyr’s book on his time there points out, his advice was that “you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable—nay, letter by letter”. For him, this way of reading was like mining, seeking gold in “little fissures”.

From words come sentences. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg asserts that writers need to pay attention to the decisions embedded in each one. After all, “what you write—what you send out into the world to be read—is the residue of the choices and decisions you make.”

For the reader, paying attention to sentences makes such authorial choices clear, adding up to the writer’s style of portraying the world. Look, for example, at the musically assonant last sentence of James Joyce’s much-anthologised short story, The Dead: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Many readers are hooked on plots, and that’s certainly one reason to keep turning the pages. But there’s a catch. Christopher Booker, among others, has pointed out that there are only a limited number of basic plots available to work with. Some of the most common: the rags to riches saga, overcoming monsters, and voyaging to unknown lands. Reading like a writer offers you the satisfaction of uncovering how skilfully a book plays or breaks with these conventions.

When it comes to characters, as Francine Prose puts it, writers are commonly told that they should be likable and sympathetic, so that readers can care about them. “And what does care mean, exactly? Too often, I’m afraid, it’s being used as a synonym for identify.” She rightly feels that this is too narrow a way of looking at it. Instead, readers should “be interested in the characters, engaged by their fates, intrigued by their complexities, curious about what will happen to them next.”

Reading like a writer offers several other satisfactions. There is pleasure in noting similes and metaphors, for example. “Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa,” says a character from a Nabokov novel. “The entire weight of the overloaded past,” Anita Desai writes about one of her own characters, “seemed to pour onto her like liquid cement that immediately set solid, incarcerating her in its stiff gloom.” For Orson Scott Card, “metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” True.

Writers have so much else in their arsenal, from deploying symbols to creating a sense of place. You don’t have to be a dusty academic to appreciate the layered echoes of Mrs Quested’s experience in the Marabar Caves, or the significance of the Valley of Ashes that Jay Gatsby’s companions drive through.

It’s not that everything is to be found in the text. Rather, everything starts from it. Historical and social contexts do matter, and it can be rewarding to consider how these are reflected in the work. Much is subjective: individual readers in individual circumstances discover the works that best appeal to them.

These are the parts that make up the whole; in the best books, they add up to more than the whole. Paying attention allows the work to bloom within you and perhaps even re-inscribe your world. Reading the work of those who give shape “as best they can to the ideas within them,” in Virginia Woolf’s words, lets you savour their unique combination of “genius and ink”.