54 pages • 1 hour read
Francine ProseReading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Close Reading”
Author Francine Prose expresses surprise that, she, a creative writing teacher for over two decades, should so often be asked if writing can be taught. The question suggests that creativity, unlike multiplication tables, is impossible to transmit from teacher to student. While Prose believes a natural gift for storytelling cannot be taught, students can certainly study and learn how to write, and on that front, the best way to learn how to write is to read.
Before creative writing programs, writers learnt how to write by paying close attention to the great works of literature. American novelist Harry Crews, for instance, has described how he dissected the works of English writer Graham Greene to understand how the latter handles pacing, point of view, and tone. The kind of reading Prose refers to is “close reading,” that is, paying attention to writing at a granular level. Prose argues that reading or absorbing a narrative word by word comes naturally to most people because that is how children read or listen to stories. As people grow up and begin to read faster, they lose touch with the art of close reading. Reading as a writer means reconnecting with this childlike attention to language.
Prose recounts her own childhood reading appetite to show how children love the possibilities books offer. Books like Alice in Wonderland allowed her to step through a door or a portal into an alternate world. As Prose grew up and began to realize gender constraints, books with plucky female heroes helped her imagine how she could be both a woman and a protagonist.
Prose counts herself lucky that her high school and college English teachers encouraged her to study texts for their language, rather than limit the study of a text to deconstructing its politics. When Prose encountered the deconstructionist approach in graduate school, she found it counter-productive to her development as a writer and dropped out of her medieval English literature program. She went on to write her first book in Bombay, India. When Prose began teaching writing, she was struck by how little her students had been taught to pay close attention to language. The emphasis on deconstruction had, in Prose’s opinion, made her students almost dislike reading itself. To address this issue, Prose decided to teach texts slowly, lingering with the students over every phrase and discussing how it contributes to the overall story. In her 20 years of teaching writing, she has found this method extremely useful for both her students and for her own process as a writer. Prose argues that a close reading course should be an essential part of a writing workshop, since writing workshops are more focused on telling a writer what to edit and what to avoid in writing. Reading a masterpiece, in contrast, lets a writer examine what to actually do.
Prose also addresses the concern of students and teachers of writing that reading accomplished works of literature makes writers feel inadequate, stymying their writing process. According to Prose, everyone will find writers who do things they cannot technically achieve themselves. The antidote for the accompanying sense of failure is not to stop reading, but to read another great writer with a different approach, “a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art” (15).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Words”
Prose recalls a technique her childhood piano teacher would use to inspire students: the teacher would reward students with a small statue of a famous composer each time they learnt a difficult piece of music. The statues were meant to be lined up on the piano, serving the students as guides. The method didn’t work with Prose as she didn’t like the piano, but she has similarly used great authors of the past to witness her writing. Writers are often in a timeless commune with the creators they admire, craving their approval. For instance, Prose describes how the 20th-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote for the 19th-century poet P. B. Shelley, her own writings reflecting how she pored over every available detail of his life.
In adopting the useful technique of writing for an audience of writers one admires, a writer can assemble their audience from a list of writers whose work is widely regarded as enduring. Prose argues that writers who constitute the canon have endured because their work is classic, rather than because of “a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males” (22). Individual taste may of course vary, but a reader should try to find out why the work of certain writers, such as Shakespeare or Jane Austen, has endured across generations. Such works make a great project for close reading, and close reading begins with the word.
Slowing down and considering each word choice in a story or narrative is essential. Prose quotes the opening paragraph of American short story expert Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953) to show how each of the author’s word choices foreshadow the rest of the story. For example, the opening sentence, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (23), sets up the grandmother—never to be named in the story—as an archetypal figure. The grandmother’s desire to avoid Florida and its associated dangers foreshadows that the woman will meet them anyway, creating an eerie tension in the story. Prose similarly examines the word choices in the short stories of two other vastly different great writers: the early-20th century short story writer Katherine Mansfield and the contemporary Canadian author Alice Munro. In the “Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1920), Mansfield uses the precise description of a dessert (a “white, terrified blancmange”) to depict the anxious and fearful state of mind of her two protagonists. Munro, in her short story “Dulse” (1980), uses only a few economical, perfect sentences to tell the life-story of her protagonist Lydia.
Munro’s story presents an additional lesson: many great writers, like Munro, frequently contradict the stock writing advice of show, don’t tell. The writing student should therefore pause to consider several key questions: What if Munro had chosen to show the reader Lydia’s history through a series of events? What if Mansfield had used different words to describe the blancmange (a pudding) or the dining room in which her protagonists, two sisters, dine? Prose suggests the stories would be vastly different. Each writer’s specific word choices have a distinct effect and are part of what makes their stories what they are.
Often when reading action-packed stories or novels, the reader tends to race across the text. Close reading of the works of writers such as 20th-century American author Paul Bowles, who combines intense plot developments with psychological realism, shows that quick reading makes the reader miss a wealth of twists. In Bowles’ shocking short story “A Distant Episode” (1945), in which a Western professor visits a fictional desert town in Morocco, the plot quickly descends into a nightmarish series of events. A quick reading might suggest that the story’s lesson is that some places are not meant to be visited. A closer reading, however, shows how each of the professor’s culturally ignorant choices in the beginning of the story has terrible ramifications for him.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
In Reading Like a Writer, author Francine Prose’s narrative persona is that of a mentor. The author uses gentle humor, generous illustrative examples, and an admission of her own limitations to generate this persona. Even as she offers writing advice, she simultaneously establishes herself as a student of writing. Prose portrays herself as a student partly by using anecdotes from her own experiences as a reader, writer, and writing teacher and partly through her own humility in the face of writers she admires. At the end of Chapter 1, in establishing The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature, Prose tells the reader that she frequently reads her favorite authors for inspiration because they are “the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me” (19). The admission that Prose, a writer of 20 novels, still regards others as authorities makes her accessible to readers of the book. Her humility becomes an effective learning technique that the reader may be inclined to adopt as well. Prose’s devotion to the writers who inspire her is frequently framed as exactly that—devotion. In Chapter 2, she refers to certain writers as her “pantheon” and describes how writers are often in an out-of-time communion with their predecessors. Prose’s vocabulary here may suggest that her appreciation of her favorites is uncritical to a fault, but it is more so a reflection of one of the principles of her constructive teaching approach. As she goes on to describe in the rest of the book, Prose teaches more by showing a writer what they can do, or what is possible and effective in writing, than by taking apart the work of a writer. She is more interested in exploring possibilities and Debunking Myths About Rules of Writing than in laying down strict laws that writers should always follow. Reflecting this principle, while all the examples of good writing in the book are quotes from real works, the examples of bad writing are made up.
If anything, by advocating for Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing, Prose demystifies to an extent the process of writing. While she establishes at the onset that the creative impulse itself cannot be taught, she questions the assumption that the craft of writing is a skill that cannot be learnt. Prose highlights these assumptions to unpack the myth that great writing is always effortless. Her experience as a writer and a teacher has shown her that what seems effortless on the page is often the result of deliberate choices, revisions, and labor: “What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire” (8). By centering the labor of writing in discussing the creative process, Prose establishes writing as a skill to acquire. She often refers to the components of writing—words, clauses, adjectives, sentences—as tools to “master.” The book is organized, chapter-wise, by these tools.
The major claims that emerge in the first two chapters concern the importance of close reading in the study of writing and the view of writing as a craft as much as an art. These chapters are also significant because Prose offers two particular opinions here that invite debate. The first is that the study of literary theory can inhibit a writer. Prose argues that deconstructionist and historical materialist approaches to literature—where readers study a text for, among other things, its inbuilt politics and power structures—distract from the craft of writing. However, writers like the famous pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante have credited their writerly worldview to a critical approach to literature (McAvan, Emily. “Writers Need Literary Theory.” Overland, 2016). Ferrante’s experience suggests that critical reading and close reading may not always be as mutually exclusive as Prose argues.
Prose also suggests that for aspiring authors, one’s easy go-to is the canon, or traditionally prescribed classical texts. One should not resist the canon for the sake of resistance, she argues, because “you can assume that if a writer’s work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males” (22). While Prose spends substantial time justifying her admiration of writers like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, and Chekov, her defense of the canon is less substantial, despite her insistence on its importance. In a review of Reading Like a Writer for The Guardian, Louise Doughty writes, “If there is fault in this excellent book, it is in Prose’s anxiety to defend The Canon.” Doughty attributes Prose’s anxiety on this point to her long history of teaching on American campuses, where “battle lines” about the canon are “sharply drawn,” albeit nonetheless critiquing Prose’s tendency toward “giving writers credit just for being famous” (Doughty, Louise. “Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose – Review.” The Guardian, 2012).
