Welcome back to the Literary Helpdesk, where school is in session.
From time to time I am asked to recommend “a good writing guide,” or “a book that every writer should read,” meaning a guide to writing that I consider to be generally useful if not indispensable. It is a difficult request to meet, not least because I am mostly ambivalent about so-called writing guides.
There is one book I recommend to everyone who would write well: Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books And Those Who Want To Write Them, by the writer and teacher, Francine Prose—only a qualified exception to my ambivalence, as the work is more of a reading guide than a writing guide—and you will infer from what I’ve already said that this is precisely why I consider it a valuable resource.
Prose first notes some of her students’ reading habits, which were hampering their efforts.
Discussing a reading seminar she led for MFA students who wanted to be writers rather than scholars, Prose recounts: “I was struck by how little attention [my students] had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used.” These students were intelligent and earnest. Prose tells us she liked them. “[E]ager, bright, and enthusiastic,” she describes them, but says they nevertheless had trouble reading even a fairly simple short story.
Prose tells us her students seemed to find reading stressful, rather than delightful.
“[T]hey had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born,” she notes with dismay. “They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds.” She says: “They didn’t seem to like reading, which also made me worry for them and wonder why they wanted to become writers.”
[Prose’s] students seemed to find reading stressful, rather than delightful.
Prose offers that this perhaps was owing to “the harsh judgments they felt required to make about fictional characters and their creators,” and goes on to tell how she asked herself how they were going to to learn to write at all?
“I had always thought,” she says, “that others learned, as I had, from reading.”
This desire to pick apart, sometimes even to undermine, and certainly—as Prose observes—to render judgment: these are characteristic of our age, which we may say is one of Critical Thought. We’ve come to view the ability to criticise as proof of mastery of a topic. There is a deep-down truth in this, but there are also many kinds of mastery, some praiseworthy, and others less so. Much of what we call criticism is no more than picking a scruffy old fight with someone we’ve never met.
Exerting the full force of critical thought on the first approach to a text, or indeed an author, is a way of clearing space. Read critically enough and you can completely declutter your bookshelves. You won’t learn much, but you’ll have ample space for your own ideas, if that’s what you want.
I think of my own experience as an undergraduate, part of which I spent taking a fair number of courses on the Bible, all of them taught from an explicitly historical-critical perspective. We learned to interrogate the texts using the archaeological and extra-Biblical textual record. We discerned, Godlike, the motives and prejudices of the authors. We treated anything that did not appear to accord perfectly with other historical sources as most likely an author’s self-interested deception.
I did learn a lot about the history of the Bible. I also found it impossible to read Sacred Scripture devotionally for more than a decade afterwards.
The approach Prose suggests is somewhat different: more akin to exploring, or even moving into, a neighbourhood than razing it to the ground to set up your own space in its place.
The passage I quoted above is from the first chapter,“Close Reading,” which Prose offers as an alternative, or at least a precursor, to a critical approach. Prose’s advice is not technical or formulaic. It is rather a meditation on how the words of the author form the experience of the reader, on how their arrangement shapes the content those words convey, and on what captivates us in good writing.
Close reading is more compatible with reading for pleasure than is critical reading because it discovers and meditates upon the deeper magic of a text. It begins with a desire to see what is there and contemplate what that means. It requires us to make a decision to allow an author to influence us, which may not mean to change our minds, but certainly to shape a part of our experience and understanding.
This desire to pick apart, sometimes even to undermine, and certainly—as Prose observes—to render judgment: these are characteristic of our age.
Towards the end of the book, in the wonderfully-titled chapter “Reading for Courage,” Prose refers to fiction as “capacious and stretchy.” It can accommodate so many different types of stories and manners of telling them. Wide and close reading, by engaging with that variety, makes our experience as readers capacious and stretchy, too. It creates in us new and differently-shaped possibilities of sorrow and joy that we don’t get from an initial critical approach because criticism is all about boundaries and limits, about slicing off the bits that don’t fit or that cross a line the author might not have known existed.
Criticism has its place. Of course it does. There are things we shouldn’t let slide, shouldn’t allow form us—here I am thinking of the likes of pornography, sentimentalism, and materialism. The world is also awash with writing that has none of the subtle art revealed in close reading, as well as writing of which a close reading will naturally evolve into criticism. As a reflex or a hermeneutic of first resort, however, criticism is a very blunt object indeed.
It affords little of learning or enjoyment, which are the primary reasons most of us read at all.
Victoria Seed is a writer and editor; she works in publishing.
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