Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Read the classics to learn how to write well – doesn’t everyone already know this? Apparently not, for the aptly-named Prose makes sure her namesake is quite clear on the subject: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading." Really? Mass-market American tastes shouldn't necessarily be consulted for examples of brilliant writing?

I don't mean to be so sarcastic. Prose's treatise on developing an eye and an ear for writing is spot-on. She, after all, was once a "bookish sixteen-year-old" who idolized Austen and the Brontës, unaware not only that "no one wrote that way anymore," but also that "no one lived that way any longer." Prose liberally quotes her favorite authors, deconstructing their techniques to determine what good writing is and how it is formed. By focusing on the basic elements of a novel or story, she manages a comprehensive examination of what constitutes a literary masterpiece.

Prose constantly discounts venerated rules of composition: “There are many occasions in literature in which telling is more effective than showing.” On the assumption that fictional conversation should not attempt to mimic the real: “Then why is so much written dialogue less colorful and interesting that what we can overhear daily in the Internet café, the mall, and on the subway?” She encourages adhering to some general guidelines but gleefully appends them with masterly exceptions.

Her observations are accurate and insightful. “[D]ialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text…One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.” Elsewhere she notes, “A well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character - his social and economic status, his hopes and dreams, his visions of himself – than a long explanatory passage.”

Prose dutifully follows her axioms with appropriate examples culled from classic works. These excerpts illuminate her points, making the book practical and understandable. She realizes the limitations of such instruction though, admitting, “Beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or in a human face.” She concludes that the only way to determine whether one has produced a rose or a weed is to spend time in rose gardens.

The book is engaging and profitable, like taking a good English class from a seasoned and passionate teacher. Prose rightly maintains that writing cannot be learned in the vacuum of a classroom; there is no substitute for the real thing. All writers, from the aspiring to the established, would do well to realize that they are only “the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.”