Reading like a writer

a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them

273 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers.

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (13 reviews)

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][1], [Flaubert][2], [Kafka][3], [Austen][4], [Dickens][5], [Woolf][6], [Chekhov][7]—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of [Philip Roth][8] and the breathtaking paragraphs of [Isaac Babel][9]; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in [George Eliot][10]'s [Middlemarch][11]. She looks to [John Le Carre][12] for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to [Flannery O'Connor][13] for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to [James Joyce][14] and [Katherine Mansfield][15] for clever examples of how to employ gesture to …

6 editions

Se es buen escritor, siendo buen lector.

4 stars

Al principio me enganché, pero luego sentí que tal vez es un libro para alguien más pro. Enfocado a escribir literatura. Eso si, tiene un montón de referencias a autores y libros ya que analiza textos para explicar como construir una buena frase, un buen párrafo, detalles, gestos, personajes... No le voy a sacar todo el jugo, pero algo se aprende. Un buen escritor en realidad lee con detenimiento, desglosa, analiza cada palabra e intenta entender la manera en la que se escribió.

Review of 'Reading Like a Writer' on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

I don't know if this book will help people be better writers. However, I do think it will encourage people to slow down a bit when reading literary classics, and to pay attention to more than just their plots.

It is true that Prose doesn't really talk much about genre fiction (except for a couple of references to Raymond Chandler) but I think that's fine. She writes what she knows, and there are plenty of other studies of what makes genre fiction great.

Review of 'Reading Like a Writer' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Learn to write by studying the masters. Prose’s opening premise that creative writing cannot taught, but she can help teach us would-be writers by showing us how to learn creative writing through studying the masters. The masters here are Austen, Von Kleist, Tolstoy, Cheever, Babel, Roth, O’Connor, Eliot, Wolfe, Etc. A close reading of the selected passages with Prose’s commentary was reminiscent of college. Beside great examples, the books has a great progression – Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue, Details, Gesture. Her close reading style works well with words and sentences, but is surprisingly effective with the other topics. While I added many of "Books to Be Read Immediately” to my reading list, I was a bit intimated after reading the best of best – even running a mile with world class marathoner is tough, writing after Austen, Tolstoy, and O’Connor is even more daunting.

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Subjects

  • Prose, Francine, -- 1947- -- Books and reading
  • English language -- Rhetoric
  • Creative writing
  • Authors -- Books and reading