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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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Narration”
Beginner writers are often stumped by the momentous question of point of view. Which character should narrate the story? Should the narrative voice be third-person omniscient or first person? Prose offers her own experience as a novice writer as a solution. She wrote her first novel as a story within a short story. The device of the framed story forced her to ask not only who was narrating the story, but also who was listening to it. Once she learnt to identify the listener, the audience of a story, the question of the narrator became easier. In British novelist Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the story of star-crossed lovers Cathy and Heathcliff is being told to Mr. Lockwood, who is renting Heathcliff’s mysterious property. Lockwood, an outsider, becomes the stand-in for the reader. He asks Nelly, Heathcliff’s housekeeper, to tell him Heathcliff’s story. Nelly is a good narrator because while she has observed Heathcliff and Cathy’s history firsthand, she is not directly involved in their tragedy.
The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is thus based on an artifice, but the reader accommodates the artifice because of the power of the narrative. Many classic works rely on a story-within-a-story device and ornate narrative conventions. While writing teachers often instruct students to stick to a realistic and firm point of view in a narrative, the advice can be circumvented as the writer grows more skilled. In Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1952), the perspective in the opening pages shifts every few sentences, from that of the protagonist Hazel Motes, to that of an old lady travelling with him on a bus, to an omniscient narrator. Similarly, point of view doesn’t need to be limited to the third or the first person. Canadian writer Mavis Gallant’s short story “Mlle. Dias de Corta” (1992), is written in the rare second person, structured as an old woman addressing a now famous actress who once boarded with her as a young girl.
Additionally, there are as many variants to first- and third-person narratives as there are stories. First-person narratives can involve an unreliable narrator, a self-aware narrator, or a “self-dramatizing, self-mocking, obsessive lunatic genius” like Humbert Humbert in Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1995). Through these examples, Prose offers the crucial lesson that writers should not get too hung up on deciding their narrator’s identity and point of view. While these questions are important, what is more important is the story the narrator is telling.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Character”
To show the effect that well-drawn characters can have on a reader, Prose recalls an unlikely pairing of text and audience from her teaching experience. As a guest writing teacher at the University of Utah in the 1980s, Prose assigned her undergraduate The Marquise of O-, a novella published in 1806 by Heinreich von Kleist. Most of the students were Mormons and non-literature majors, and the novella dealt with themes like sex, religion, an unaccounted pregnancy, and violence. It also had chapters suggesting an inappropriate relationship between a father and a daughter. Prose feared her students would not connect with the novella. To her great surprise, the class discussions were animated with regard to the book’s characters, especially the titular marquise, “as if they knew her, as if her family lived next door” (129). The book’s characters had come alive for the Utah students.
Kleist does not use physical descriptions to identify his characters. He does not even describe the internal monologues of his characters. Rather, he uses carefully placed details and the character’s actions to flesh them out for the reader. For instance, in the novella that Prose discusses, the marquise is first described as a lady of “unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children” (123) who “without her knowing how […] was in the family way” (123) and now wants the father of the baby to “report himself” (123) so she can marry him for reasons of propriety. This description establishes the incongruity of the situation. The marquise, already a mother and therefore familiar with reproduction, claims to have no idea how she is pregnant again. Her reputation is perfect, so her pregnancy is portrayed as bizarre, and despite being pregnant in a scandalous fashion, the marquise remains concerned about social appearance. Thus, the reader is drawn to the mystery and human contradictions of the marquise from the onset and wants to know her motives. However, instead of telling the reader what the marquise thinks, Klein lets her actions and responses draw her character for the reader in a series of events and twists. This approach leaves the character’s actions open to interpretation, which engages the reader even more in her story.
While Kleist uses the actions of his characters to define them, writers like Jane Austen use dialogue, details, actions, and the character’s inner life to flesh them out. Austen’s particular genius is her irony: how she can subtly indicate the difference between what a character thinks about themselves and what the reader ought to see. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen describes the minor character Mr. Dashwood, who has been asked by his now-deceased father to share his inheritance with his half-sisters, as follows: “When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. He then really thought himself equal to it” (137). The phrase “meditated within himself,” which suggests intense internal reflection, combined with the unimpressive outcome, which does not live up to his promise at all, indicates the nature of Dashwood’s character: not even his own father, on his deathbed, could trust the man. Moreover, the brief line at the end suggests that Dashwood is unable to even recognize this shortcoming; despite his stinginess, which betrays a promise to his dying father, Dashwood sees no fault with himself.
Prose turns to other 19th-century realists, such as George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert, to show how detail, descriptions, and dialogues can make characters come alive. In a seeming reversal of Kleist’s technique, Eliot introduces her larger-than-life characters in great detail. In Middlemarch (1871), the introduction describes not only the heroine Dorothea Brooke’s appearance but also the books she has memorized. Rather than burying the reader in detail, this introduction foreshadows the difficulties that lay ahead for Dorothea. The combination of observations lay out the irreconcilable differences between her temperament and her social position. Immediately, there is tension between Dorothea’s current status and what she wants. The different examples Prose uses show that there are many ways to create memorable and identifiable characters.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
While the previous two sections analyzed the building blocks of written language, that is, words, sentences, and paragraphs, Prose now turns her attention to the building blocks of a story or a narrative, albeit while continuing to point to Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing. Elements like narration and characters involve even more subjective and complex choices, which is why they frequently stymie the beginner writer. Again, Prose helps the reader through these conundrums by way of personal anecdote. She reveals that the only way she was able to “trick” herself into writing a novel was to situate its story within the “frame” of another short story. Prose’s use of the verb “trick” here is significant because it implies that she had a tremendous mental block about structuring her narrative. Questions like who should tell the story and in which voice dominated her writing process to the extent that she had to manipulate her own mind into getting her story on page. Left unaddressed, these questions can prove a writer’s biggest enemy. Further, the best way to overcome these questions is to write one’s story, nevertheless.
The question of narrative and voice is especially tough to solve given the seeming constraints of realism. Prose alludes to this constraint when she shows how many classical works are in fact, narrated in a way that involves an artifice or a stylized convention. The story of American writer Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), for example, “is introduced by an account of a highly civilized gathering attended by a first-person narrator who is soon supplanted by another first-person narrator, and who subsequently disappears from the tale” (101). Despite the convoluted and unreal narrative style, Turn of the Screw is regarded as a masterpiece of psychological realism. Examples like Turn of the Screw show the beginner writer that realism does not depend on choice of narrator. In fact, Prose suggests incorporating stylistic conventions like story-within-story, interpolated anecdotes, and interlinked narratives to help writers break the block around narration. It is striking that many of the devices that Prose mentions are found in older literary forms, such as fairy and folk tales, and 19th-century literature. The subtext here furthers the theme of Debunking Myths About Rules of Writing. Contemporary norms of narration, such as a reliable and consistent narrator, realistic-sounding conversations, and shorter stretches of narrative can be limiting for writers. Prescriptive rules around point of view are also limiting. As always, wide and close reading is the antidote to these constraints because it shows the reader that any rule “can be circumvented by any writer skillful enough to get away with it” (105).
A particular tonal consistency uniting Chapters 5 and 6, and to some extent for most of the book, is that the text chooses to refer to works composed no later than the mid-20th century. Chapter 6 quotes at length one of the oldest works that the book analyzes, The Marquise of O- , written in German in 1806. Significantly, Prose makes the narrative choice to include this novella in a chapter on character. The juxtaposition is deliberate because Prose wants to show the reader how strongly written characters transcend the constraint of time. It is also a rebuttal to the contemporary writing injunction that characters be identifiable for the reader. Too often, making a character identifiable becomes shorthand for making the character accessible and mundane. In fact, characters who really connect with readers need not be any of these things; rather, such characters just need to tap into a particular, specific human emotion or moment. Prose’s chapter on character plays out as a series of juxtapositions and reversals to illustrate her point. She first offers the unlikely pairing of The Marquise of O- and her class of largely Mormon—and, it is suggested, conservative—undergraduates. Upsetting Prose’s expectations, the students actively engage with the text. Further, Prose juxtaposes a discussion on character with one of the oldest and lesser-known texts featured in the book. That the reader’s interest will be piqued in this work is another reversal. Finally, she juxtaposes other approaches to character with that of Kleist, but unlike previous chapters, all texts featured in this chapter belong to the same century. Prose draws the reader’s attention to this anomaly, but the reversal she offers in this case is that sometimes characters from a bygone era may be more identifiable to the reader than those who dress and speak similarly.
By this section, another important textual motif is established, which is a love for the great classics. Prose emphasizes The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature, which she views as far more likely to be helpful guides than works that have not yet proven their ability to stand the test of time. Readers will note that Prose refers frequently to the work of certain authors. These constitute, among others, Anton Chekov, Isaac Babel, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, and Raymond Carver. Most of these writers are regarded in mainstream Western academia as leaders of their genre. For example, Chekov is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in literature, as well as a pioneer of the short story form, while Austen is considered one of the best novelists in history, seminal in the development of the modern novel form. Writers from the 19th century, more than any other century, populate the text, from Leo Tolstoy to Austen to George Eliot. A close second are writers writing before 1960, such as Mansfield, Babel, and Flannery O’Connor. While the choice of authors reflects Prose’s own education growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it can also be attributed to the fact that the 19th and early 20th centuries saw great leaps in the development of literature. The modern novel form emerged in the 19th century with writers like Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. The first decades of the 20th century saw the rise of important movements like modernism; surrealism; and, in the United States, the Harlem Renaissance. Further, many of these works have endured, such as those of Tolstoy and Austen, which continue to be adapted in film and on stage. Others, such as the works of Chekov and O’Connor, continue to be models for teaching literary form. However, the question remains: Why opt for older writers if more contemporary great writers could offer equally important lessons? The answer lies in the fact that the writers Prose quotes enjoyed more space to play with their dialogue, narrative flourishes, and artifice. Yet unencumbered by prescriptive rules of writing and the pressures of the current publishing industry, their writing is roomy enough to allow experimentation.
