Most people just read books. That is, they absorb the information, or enjoy the plot and characters, without thinking too much about how and why they work. It’s a lot like watching a play, or a magic show. It’s supposed to be relaxing, so sit back and enjoy.
Reading like a writer is more like being another magician who’s watching the magic show. Some of the tricks, you already know how to do, so you watch to see if they’re done smoothly and without everyone else seeing what the guy on stage is doing. Others, you don’t know, but you can catch on right away to what the stage magician is doing by extrapolating from what you already do know how to do.
And then there are the things you don’t already know, where you watch the stage magician like a hawk, trying to figure out whether it’s sleight-of-hand or special equipment; looking for a string in the sleeve or a trap door; hunting for the exact methodology, because if a trick works on another magician, then damn, it’s good, and you really want to add it to your own repertoire.
What this means in terms of reading (for me, anyway) is that I have two reading modes. The first is the way everyone else does it – just reading the story. The difference is that for me, “just reading” is a little more of an effort, because I have to turn off the little observer/critic in the back of my head who’s usually going, “How’d she make that work? Oh, shouldn’t have doubled up on that phrase. Oh, nice image! Ow, and it had to go and get clunky right after…” Some writers, once they learn how to read like this, have a really hard time not reading like this, and therefore can’t read books that trip too many of their “clumsily done” detectors.
Because what Gray said in his comment on my last post was dead on: it is a whole lot easier, most of the time, to see what is wrongwith a piece of writing than to see how the writer did the stuff that got done right. It’s also a whole lot easier for most of us to analyze the good bits of a piece of mediocre-to-good writing than the techniques used by a master at the top of his game. The really brilliant stuff is like looking into a flawlessly cut diamond – you can see the beauty of the result, but unless you’re already a master gemcutter yourself, you have no idea how it was done, because there are no tool marks or other signs to show how it got from an unprepossessing lump of rock to a thing of beauty. There’s only the finished product to admire, and it’s seamless.
Fortunately for the rest of us, good-but-not-brilliant writing is a lot more common…and a lot easier to pick apart to get at the hows and whys and the techniques the writer used. There are fuzzy bits and places where the trailing ends were imperfectly woven in, so you can still see them and follow them back through the pattern to find out how it was constructed in the first place.
And some of the best fiction for learning how to do this is the really popular stuff that sells like hotcakes, most especially the stuff that more “discriminating” critics sneer at. Because stuff that sells that well is doing something right…and stuff that gets sneered at usually has enough loose ends that it’s not too hard to pick apart and see how the author did it.
The other trick is to find before and after copies of the same book, and compare them line-by-line. This used to be something only graduate students with access to an archive of authors’ manuscripts could do, but there are a number of SF writers (me included) who have re-edited one or more of their early works later on in their careers. Unedited versions of some of Robert Heinlein’s works came out a few years back; Christopher Stasheff, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others have reworked one or more early books. Getting hold of both versions can be tricky (and sometimes expensive, since the “before” versions are usually old first editions and priced for collectors) but it’s possible.
For those who are interested in hunting them down: I did a major rewrite of my first novel, Shadow Magic, when it was republished in the Shadows Over Lyra anthology. Talking to Dragons was originally published by MagicQuest, then by Ace books, which have identical interiors; the re-edited version is the one that came out from Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin (with the Scholastic paperbacks) and that is the current in-print version.
And I think that next, I’ll go through the changes I made to the opening of Shadow Magic, so people can see what I’m talking about when I say “do a line-by-line comparison.”
Great post!
I’ve found that I have trouble going back to books I enjoyed years ago, though I’m not sure whether that’s because I’ve grown used to more sophisticated plots, or because, like you said, they “trip too many of [my] ‘clumsily done’ detectors.”
Brandon Sanderson (another incredible fantasy author) posted one of his books (Warbreaker) on his website so that fans can read it for free. Just as great, he posted some of his earlier drafts so that readers can see the changes he made in editing.
I have plans to reread something popular that has been torn apart by critics. My purpose is to find out how the author creates page turners. I plan to pay close attention to pacing.
You might remember the days when you were asking ‘well, what is the writer doing there’ and I could only answer ‘I have no idea.’ Learning to read as a writer can be hard, but it can be learnt, and starting my writing journal where I pick up whatever book I read and focus on three or four things that work or don’t work for me has been a learning experience.
Some books I used to like are no longer books I can read, because the good bits no longer seem as good to me, and the problems stand out much more. On the other hand, I can appreciate a good book on more levels, which includes some books that I would not have loved for plot or character, so overall I would say that my appreciation has shifted to different books, but that I haven’t _lost_ anything by analyzing books in great detail.
Amanda, the problem I have with page-turning is that I read as a writer. There are a number of things – a Bickhamesque structure, various tricks to create tension, ways of manipulating the reader – that will work for may readers on an emotional level – but once you know how it’s done, they lose their shine. Any time I feel ‘I’m supposed to root fot this character’ I get thrown out of the storyverse.
The conclusion is that for every technique you identify, you have to ask whether it’s appropriate for your book and your intended readership.
I’ve done that with everything from acting to video editing and embroidery, but I just realized that I’ve never actually analyzed the books I read for for the “how”. Think I’ll start now.
green_knight @ 4 – This is interesting:
because getting better at spotting techniques doesn’t always have that effect on me. Some of these, like an illusionist’s flourishes, actually add to my appreciation. Thinking about it, for me the difference is something like: do I get the sense of real people and real events dramatized to bring out truths about them, or only of arbitary crap made up to press a sequence of buttons?
The first brings me in on its side as reader and writer both, even if the technique is quite crude. The second just makes me bored and faintly queasy, however slick the execution.
Of course, that’s just the literary sin I’m most afraid of committing.
Some of the “page turners” really seem to make me keep reading – against my will. One of the techniques that works, but that I hate, is to introduce a cliffhanger at the end of pretty much every chapter. Read on and see what happens! These are usually books I’ll read fast, but not read a second time.
Writers I like (present company included) get me interested in the characters themselves. “How will the Baron react when he finds out? What will Esther do when she realizes he lied?” That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to keep reading, instead of the brute force cliffhanger approach.
How do you get readers interested in the characters? That will be in my next comment, so keep reading! (All right, not really. I have no idea. That’s why I’m reading this blog, to find out.)
Greenknight – Some people can turn off (or mostly turn off) their ability to notice technique while reading; they can shift from “reading like a writer” to “just reading,” and if they’re “just reading,” they don’t pay attention to the how and why enough to be bothered by noticing technique, unless the use of technique is really clumsy. Some can’t turn it off, though, and if you’re one of those, well, you may just have to resign yourself to a higher class of reading material. 🙂
Gray – I think it’s a matter of integration and using the technique that’s right for the scene. It’s an extension of Mark Twain’s thing about the lightning and the lightning but – the difference between the right technique and the almost-right technique has that same radical difference to the sensitive palate. I wouldn’t worry about doing it yourself too much; the mistakes one really needs to be wary of are the ones one is not particularly aware of or sensitive to, not the ones that are on one’s personal I-hate-that list.
Matt – I’ll try to get to some of that in future posts!
I was just going to do an article on my blog about “Reading like a Writer.” I even had the same title for the post! 😀
Anyway, I think you had some very good points there! In my case, it’s really, really hard for me to turn off that mode. If it does turn off, I usually don’t notice…and if a book can make me do that, I know it’s a good book because I am fully engrossed in it.