By Francine Prose
ISBN-10: 0060777052
ISBN-13: 9780060777050
Long sooner than there have been creative-writing workshops and levels, how did aspiring writers learn how to write? by means of analyzing the paintings in their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.
In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invitations you to take a seat through her facet and take a guided travel of the instruments and the tips of the masters. She reads the paintings of some of the best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their paintings has continued. She takes excitement within the lengthy and sumptuous sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by means of the intense characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She appears to be like to John Le Carré for a lesson in tips on how to improve plot via discussion, to Flannery O'Connor for the crafty use of the telling element, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for smart examples of the way to hire gesture to create personality. She cautions readers to decelerate and be aware of phrases, the uncooked fabric out of which literature is crafted.
Written with ardour, humor, and knowledge, Reading Like a Writer will motivate readers to come back to literature with a clean eye and an keen heart.
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Extra resources for Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.)
Example text
Just to demonstrate that this sort of sentence—the complex, introductory sentence that not only establishes the tone but also encapsulates something essential about the remainder of the work—can exist in fiction as well as in the speculative essay, let's look at the opening of Heinrich von Kleist's story "The Earthquake in Chile": In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the very moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands of lives were lost, a young Spaniard by the name of Jéronimo Rugera, who had been locked up on a criminal charge, was standing against a prison pillar, about to hang himself It's a sentence so full of bravado and playful assurance that it's the literary equivalent of a poker player opening with a gi- READING LIKE A WRITER 47 gantic bet.
These two low-key sentences have already ushered us into the paradoxically rich and claustrophobic realm (both outside and inside the sisters) in which the story occurs. They enable us to see their world from a perspective at once so objective and so closely identified with these child-women that everything about their actions (giggling, squirming in their beds, worrying about READING LIKE A WRITER 21 the little mouse scurrying about their room) makes us think they might be children until, almost five pages into the story, the maid, Kate, comes into the dining room, and—in just two words—the story dazzles us with a flash of harsh sunlight that reveals the age of the "old tabbies": And proud young Kate, the enchanted princess, came in to see what the old tabbies wanted now.
Nor is there a more vivid way to create the image than the seeming improbability of the two women slowly ballooning back to earth without ever having left their couch. That daring deployment of the incorrect word also occurs in the first sentence of Joyce's "The Dead," in which we are told that Lily, the caretaker's daughter, is literally run off her feet. We know it isn't literally. The mistake is one that Lily herself might make, which puts us momentarily in her point of view and prepares us for the ways in which the story will play with viewpoint, with notions of truth and untruth, and with the ways that class background and education affect how we use the language.
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.) by Francine Prose
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