Why Writers Should Be Deliberate Readers

When I conduct writing workshops, I break my process into a simple and even dishearteningly imitable series of steps:

Step 1: Toss your phone into a pond

Step 2: Read

Step 3: Write

Step 4: Rewrite

Why is this disheartening? Because many writers are aware that they are engaged in an activity that can feel more formidable than it needs to be. Fortunately, the planet now abounds with writers and voices. (And let us, for the time being, ignore the statistical converse: shortening attention spans and shrinking readerships).

Turning back to the steps, I don’t think I need to elaborate on why Step 1 is a necessary precursor to doing anything at all, let alone writing. But we should linger at length on Step 2, a step that is increasingly skirted by many authors. Without passing any judgment on other writers, I would like to make a different claim: that the breadth and depth of one’s reading are easily discernible in one’s writing. At the risk of being called an intellectual snob, I prefer, as a reader, to invest my time in writers who are widely read.

And this is the thing: you don’t need to pepper your prose with literary titles or big words or with any other showy mannerisms. Your reading will show up in other ways: in the lilt in your words, the bounce in your sentences and more than anything else, in the cultivation of a distinct writerly voice.

When writing my books, I also turned to a few books on the craft. One of the more striking reads was  Reading Like A Writer  by Francine Prose. Prose herself was a graduate student in medieval English Literature. At a fiction class in college, the teacher showed her how to “line edit.” She marveled at how the sentences visibly changed with a few conscious additions, deletions and word changes: “It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.”

In her book, Prose suggests that as a writer, you need to deconstruct books in the way a hardware engineer might dismantle a computer. Or to pick a more morbid example, in the manner of Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci who pried open corpses to examine body parts. Depending on your perspective, such reading can add to or detract from the pleasure of books. But it’s almost a necessary precursor to writing well.

Fortunately, for us, Prose herself is a masterful writer. So even as we watch her disentangle the “Greats”, we marvel at her sentences. We’re almost torn between dwelling on the passages she dissects or on dissecting her writing for its own appeal. Like most writers, Prose was always an avid reader: “I read addictively, constantly.” At one time, while in Bombay, she was afraid of running out of reading material. To slow herself down, she read Proust in French: “And as I puzzled out the gorgeous, labyrinthine sentences, I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.”

It’s a cliché that all new creators rest on the shoulders of giants. In any domain, past role models are studied not only for their methods but also for their lives. It’s immaterial to new creators that many of their role models are dead. The memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova exhumed Pushkin. “With the thoroughness of a detective or a jealous woman, she ferreted out everything about the people around him, probing their psychological motives, and turning every woman he had ever so much smiled at inside out like a glove.” It’s amusing that Pushkin had died in 1837, long before Akhmatova’s birth.

Words and Sentences Matter

Given that all books are made up of words, it feels redundant to say that “words matter.” And yet, as Prose reminds us, such self-consciousness about one’s words has to be gleaned by studying others’ works, of writers who studied other writers, because they cared so intensely about their words.

She offers the seemingly simple first sentence of Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” The sentence runs as follows:  The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.  What can we observe about this line straightaway? For one, the “grandmother” is not named. Moreover, as Prose puts it, she’s not affectionately called “Grannie” or “Grandma” (or “Patti” in the Indian context). This makes the character somewhat intimidating and tough. Someone who serves as a stand-in for an archetypal grandmother. Here’s a generic “grandmother” O’Connor seems to say and invites readers to fill in whatever images they might have of such women.

But the deductions don’t end there. There’s a lot more that’s packed into that line. “…didn’t want to go” seems to indicate that she’s a stubborn woman, someone with a mind of her own, perhaps someone who prefers to control destiny rather than go with the flow. Beyond that, for anyone who’s been a long-time reader, we can also detect a Chekov-type of setup. In a letter to Lazarev, Anton Chekov wrote: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

Of course, that rule, like many other writing rules, has been shattered by equally deft writers and even ironically, by Chekov himself. Still one must break rules knowingly, rather than naively or carelessly.

Assuming that O’Connor has deliberately planted that first line to hint at what follows, if the grandmother starts out with not wanting to go to Florida, surely that is where the author plans to drag her while carrying the bemused reader along. As Prose observes: “The first sentence is a refusal, which, in its very simplicity, emphasizes the force with which the old woman is digging in her heels.” In other words, the sheer punchiness of that first sentence is indicative of many things: of the grandmother’s character, of the intensity of her feelings, maybe of the terror or menace in the journey to follow.

Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite

Such attention to detail can rarely be accomplished in first drafts. Prose cites an instance, wherein, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky visited the short story master Isaac Babel. A towering pile of manuscripts tottered on Babel’s desk. Paustovsky asked Babel if he had abandoned short stories and turned to writing novels instead. Babel responded that he was merely working on the 22^nd draft of his short story.

The Process is Recursive

Though the process might be beguilingly or deceptively simple, most good writers acknowledge that writing is difficult. Even as you absorb words from other texts like plants absorb water, your own writing expands. Your words can be sharp or fluid, concise or bloated. Your words reveal who you are, and how you intend for the reader to interact with your text. Given that we all work with the same raw material – 26 letters of the English alphabet (or the letters of any other language you might be working with) – you must strive to make your pages sound unmistakably like you.

References

Francine Prose,  Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, Harper Collins, 2006