Reading Like a Writer summary

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are currently 170,000 words in use in the English language. A writer certainly has a lot of choice! But she is also faced with the challenge of finding that one perfect word among 170,000 that expresses exactly what she wants to say.

As a result, every word in every great work of fiction is there as the result of meticulous decision making. To better grasp the genius of a writer, consider what word they could have used instead, why they didn’t and what effect their chosen word has. First sentences of novels make great illustrations of this. Consider the opening of American writer Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.”

What makes a sentence beautiful? That’s no easy question to answer. Normally, we just know one when we see one. Though there are no hard and fast rules for fantastic phrasing, we can investigate examples to find some common features. Some of the most stunning sentences are also the simplest, using only the words they need to communicate powerfully with the reader.

German writer Heinrich von Kleist was a master of clear, clean sentences and the opening to his story The Earthquake in Chile provides us with a great example: “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.”

Let’s imagine you’re a detective. And not just a detective with any old mission. Like the protagonist in American writer Rex Stout’s story Plot It Yourself, your task is to figure out if three supposedly plagiarized manuscripts are written by the same person. Where would you look for clues? Word choice? Phrasing? Punctuation, maybe?

Well, the best clue would be found in none of those! The most revealing aspect of an individual’s writing style is the way they paragraph. As the detective says: “A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one – the paragraphing.” Paragraphs, it seems, are more important than you’d first expect – they’re a fantastic tool for creating emphasis. But how?

Every story can be told from countless perspectives. But while stories from the perspective of an animal or a brick in the wall of a family home might make for interesting stylistic experiments, first- and third-person narration remain the most popular and flexible options.

These two narrative styles each has its own strengths and challenges. Once you’ve decided on your narrator, his attitude and a tone that reflects it, it’s up to you to work through these lenses.

In literature as in life, there are three key things that will define you: what you do, what you think and what you say. To these, some might also add how you look. But, to be honest, bookworms like us don’t care much for superficiality!

While the ability to create living, breathing and unforgettable characters is common to all great writers, the path they take to create these characters will always differ. Some writers use a character’s actions to define his personality. Heinrich von Kleist is one of these types; your understanding of his characters is gained by observing what they do, such as how they react to shameless injustice, uncomfortable proposals or even life-threatening earthquakes. The inner thoughts of the character are rarely explicitly expressed.

Do you consider yourself a good liar or a bad one? If you aren’t sure, here’s a quick way to spot the difference: while bad liars scramble to stack up facts and arguments to give themselves greater credibility, a smart liar knows that what’s really going to keep their tall tales unnoticed is a realistic detail.

Great writers are, in many ways, not so different from great liars. Both make up stories that are untrue yet convincing, and both know how to make themselves convincing by using a few specific, realistic details. Simply adding a trivial, yet very particular aspect of your story will make listeners feel that you simply must be telling the truth – otherwise, why would you think to mention something like that?