Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Writ...
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Written by Francine Prose.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
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 Carré 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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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Good.
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a tutorial on one approach to 'close reading', intended to help aspiring writers learn from great writers and great writing. For those of us who are not aspiring writers, the book provides alternative ways of reading and thinking about what we've read.
Each chapter considers one aspect of writing, from word choice, to sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, details, gestures, and concludes with an extended essay on what can be learned from Checkhov, a writer that Prose considers to be an exemplar of the writer's craft. The book is pedagogical, reflecting Prose's experience as a teacher of writing and literature. She offers encouragement to the would-be writer, and emphasizes that although she offers many 'rules', the writers she uses in her examples very often break those rules to achieve particular artistic purposes.
The central idea of the book is the importance of detail. The big things, plot, ideas, Vision (capital V) don't matter as much as the details: the small gesture that sets the tone for a scene, the detail of clothing that indicates social class or era or character. Such details require careful observation (vision with small v) on the part of both the writer and the reader.
Prose provides an appendix with an extensive reading list of books by the authors that she cites as examples (and others, I think, unless I simply missed some of the references).
If you haven't read anything by Francine Prose you are missing out. I've read Gluttony, part of the Oxford/NYU Seven Deadly Sins series, Household Saints, the novel she is most well known for, and The Blue Angel, an updated take on the original 1930s era German film.