How to read like a writer

1 The bottom line

Pick a passage that works, take it apart sentence by sentence, then copy its techniques into your own draft. Writers who do this stop guessing, because every effect on the page is a choice they can reuse.

2 Key takeaways

• Treat every word on the page as a choice, and ask why it is there. A passage works because a person decided each word and mark.
  • Francine Prose0:55 says the basis of teaching is remembering that the text did not pre-exist and a human being decided each word and mark.
  • Dana Gioia1:36:24 keeps finding that a great passage is far simpler and shorter than he remembered, and that its effect comes from radiant details and what was left out.
• Copy the passage out by hand. Writing it out sinks in deeper than reading it.
  • Steven Pressfield13:30 retyped pages of Henry Miller and Hemingway, and then retyped them again.
  • Dan Wang54:40 retypes a few New Yorker paragraphs at a time, which forces him to notice where the writer chose a different adjective.
• Go back to the same book or passage many times. Each pass shows more of the machinery.
  • Jimmy Soni31:01 read The Everything Store over 20 times for The Founders.
  • Fareed Zakaria29:15 says that on a second and third read the underlying structure and mechanics of an argument become visible.
• Steal the technique, not the surface. A technique travels to a new subject, and the wording does not.
  • Andrew Sean Greer24:23 steals Proust's long sentence that lands on a colon, usable once or twice a book, and rejects Proust's 50 page sermon.
  • Noah Hawley1:00:16 did not rewatch Alien. He asked what feelings it produced and looked for a different story that would produce the same ones.
• Test the borrowed move in your draft, then measure the draft against the model. The gap shows you what to fix next.
  • Brie Wolfson31:50 asks what she likes about the vibe of her saved paragraphs that she is not getting in her own.

you slow down and you just say why this word and why not another word

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

2.1 Choose a passage worth taking apart

Pick a model you genuinely love, and pick one that fits the problem in front of you.

• Copy only the writing you genuinely like. Paul Graham51:20 made this rule after a mistake.
  • He first imitated school short stories and philosophy papers because they seemed high status, even though he found them confusing.
  • He then decided to copy only what he really liked and to work out for himself what is good.
  • David Perell, in the same conversation, adds a habit: after a museum or a book, list what you loved and hated and why.
  • Michael Mauboussin35:50 says famous writers like Stephen Jay Gould never work for him. He does not force it and does more of what works for him.
• Choose a model that has already solved your problem. Steven Johnson1:25:20 does this before every new kind of book.
  • Before The Ghost Map, his first historical narrative, he read Erik Larson's Devil in the White City, a detective-structure book that recreates a city in time.
  • Before Infernal Machine, which had on-the-record dialogue for the first time, he went back to Larson's The Splendid and the Vile, which is built from diaries.
  • When you cannot write a certain scene, Prose1:49 says to find a master who did it well and use it as a model. Look at who is talking, when, and whose eyes the scene is seen through.
  • Prose cites the party in Joyce's The Dead and the ball in Anna Karenina, where Tolstoy writes much of the scene from jilted Kitty's point of view because she would notice Anna dancing with Vronsky.
• Look outside your own lane. Copying only people in your field makes everything look the same.
  • Shaan Puri1:42:37 studies Aaron Sorkin and comedians rather than business writers.
  • Steph Smith56:46 describes the Cultural Tutor, who found culture writing dry, studied copywriters and asked how to apply their methods to 13th century Italy.
  • He reached 100,000 Twitter followers while working at McDonald's and living with his parents Smith56:46.
• Let time do some of the filtering. Amor Towles52:54 says history discards the mediocre over roughly 50 years.
  • His reading group of four friends has read a novel a month for 20 years, and about 90 percent of the authors are dead.
  • They stop to read single paragraphs aloud and admire how they are built.
  • Greer17:36 finds forgotten inventions in old novels, such as Rebecca never naming its narrator.

2.2 Read it slowly, then ask how

Slow down until you can see each decision, and read the same passage more than once.

• Ask why this word, and why this punctuation. Prose0:55 calls this close reading.
  • Ask why the writer chose this word and not another, or a semicolon instead of a period.
  • Greer24:23 reads like a detective. When something works he asks how it was pulled off, and when something bores him he asks why.
  • John Lennox7:43 says to ask what a text says before asking what it means. Only then ask why a passage sits where it does.
  • Greer notes that Cormac McCarthy's missing quotation marks create a coldness that would not suit his own warm books Greer24:23.
• Read once for pleasure, then again for the machinery. The first read keeps you honest about what moved you.
  • David Baldacci1:27:32 reads novels purely for pleasure. When one hits him, he asks why it was great and rereads to find the moments where a character changed.
  • Jayne Anne Phillips11:30 adds a third pass. Plot the book on paper by writing down what happens in each chapter.
  • Phillips did this with Fat City, which Leonard Gardner cut down from 800 pages to what she calls a diamond.
  • It took Zakaria29:15 several readings of The Great Gatsby to see how beautiful the writing was.
• Take one paragraph and work through it sentence by sentence. A single paragraph is small enough to see whole.
  • Gioia1:36:24 picks a page from a writer he thinks is great and works out why it works. He has done this with Orwell, Clive James, Randall Jarrell and John Cheever.
  • He looked at Cheever's paragraphs word by word to learn how a single evocative detail can overwhelm.
• Listen to the passage as well as read it. Rhythm lives in the ear.
  • David Perell51:38 reads along with the audiobook, ideally read by the author, to hear how they pause, emphasize and punctuate.
  • Joy Harjo25:45 tells students to listen to a poem the way they listen to a song, then listen again.
• For reported work, ask why the piece was written and who was talking. Byrne Hobart3:30 reads deeply reported stories this way.
  • After a failure, former employees have free time and every reason to blame someone else.
  • He reads Smartest Guys in the Room as ex-Enron employees each explaining why the collapse was another part of the company's fault.

2.3 Copy it out by hand

Writing the passage yourself makes you feel choices that your eyes skip.

• Retype or write out the passage, a sentence at a time. Dan Wang54:40 borrowed this from music study.
  • It forces you to notice where the writer chose a different adjective or let a sentence run another way, so writing stops feeling random.
  • As a clarinetist he copied a Beethoven string quartet and a Mahler symphony by hand, then ported the exercise to prose.
• Do it again. Pressfield13:30 says writing a passage out, and then writing it again, sinks in deeper than reading it closely.
  • He says copying is how you eventually find your own voice.
  • Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby just to feel what writing a great novel was like, and his style still became completely different from Fitzgerald's.
• Use pen and paper if you can. Sam Parr48:49 spent months locked in a room, an hour a day, copying the best sales letters of all time by hand and never typing.
  • You learn the texture and patterns of good writing, even writing you do not want to imitate. Then you steal the parts you like.
  • He says up to the 1920s or 1930s this was how children were taught.
• Ask how each line gets to the next. Rosanne Cash14:51 wrote down Dylan's lyrics in her twenties and asked how he got from one line to the next and why it works.
  • She noticed how far he stepped out of the expected and then came back around.
  • She did this with Positively 4th Street and Subterranean Homesick Blues, and with Guy Clark, the Beatles, Elton John and Joni Mitchell.
• Mark up the sound. Gioia30:39 copies a poem he loves in ink.
  • In pencil he marks syllable counts, rhyme scheme, metrical stresses and speech stresses. It shows him how the writer made the sound.
  • He fills a notebook with these analysed poems and says it taught him how sound does the work.

2.4 Name the technique and lift it out

Separate what the passage does from what it is about, so you can use the move on your own subject.

• Capture the effect, not the plot. Noah Hawley1:00:16 thinks of a source as a paint swatch of emotions.
  • He asks what feelings the work produced in him, then looks for a different story that would produce the same feelings.
  • A high school assignment to write a new chapter of Catch-22 in Heller's voice trained this skill.
• Lift one device and put it to new use. Greer17:36 collects devices from old books.
  • He borrowed the hidden-name device for the narrator of Villa Coco.
  • For its gentle comedy he read Nancy Mitford and Gerald Durrell.
  • Philip Roth taught him how to write a rant, and John Updike's playful description inspired Less.
  • Derek Thompson52:46 read several Roth novels in a row, and Roth's layers of feeling beneath feeling came out in his own piece on online dating, as anxiety, horniness and excitement.
• Imitate a voice on purpose to find its hidden choices. R.F. Kuang51:10 cites Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft. Conscious imitation is a deep dive into the small choices that add up to a voice.
  • She is writing a short story influenced by Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, using its polite, deferential, emotionally restrained narrator.
  • The aim is to ask why a voice fits a story, not to become a copycat.
  • For Babel she borrowed24:57 the maximalism and run-ons of the Victorians and Dickens. For Yellowface she modeled the rhythm of a viral tweet, then dropped it for later books because it flattens nuance.
• Carry the model's questions to your own subject. Jimmy Soni44:40 says a model teaches you not the answers but the questions.
  • He studied the questions Brad Stone asked in The Everything Store, like where the name Amazon came from.
  • That led him to dig up the origin of the name PayPal through slide decks and many sources.

2.5 Use it in your draft and measure the result

Put the borrowed move to work, keep rewriting, and hold your pages up against the model.

• Fit your own idea into a borrowed structure. Harry Dry58:33 copied the layout of a Volkswagen winter-prep ad.
  • It had two columns, placeholder images, a checklist, headers and matching bullets, and he fit his own idea into it.
  • He rewrote it until he could not improve it, fixing one problem at a time, such as a two line item that made the page messy.
  • The final ad reads "throw money and pray" against "learn copywriting," with "twice as fast" in bold.
  • David Zucker1:22 built Airplane! on the plot of the 1957 drama Zero Hour, so the structure was done and only the surprises needed writing.
  • Mark Forsyth44:57 says Shakespeare took Plutarch's prose, tweaked it into verse and added alliteration for the Cleopatra barge speech. The form was more original than the content.
• Rewrite in the master's style, then throw the imitation away. Ward Farnsworth57:58 has students rewrite modern Supreme Court opinions as Oliver Wendell Holmes would have.
  • To imitate, you have to listen closely and find the signatures of the style. What you learned stays.
  • He separates imitation, which sounds foolish, from influence59:20, which shapes what your ear finds attractive. Lincoln read the King James Bible and Shakespeare for thousands of hours and never sounds like either.
• Compare your draft to your favorite pages. A draft that feels off usually lacks something the model has.
  • Brie Wolfson31:50 keeps a note of paragraphs she loves. When a draft feels off, she asks what she likes about their vibe that she is not getting.
  • Paul Harding28:56 says your writing can only be as good as the best things you have read. Ask why the distance is so large.
  • Harding calls wanting to write a book as good as your favorite ambition rooted in reverence, not ego, and notes that Melville was trying to write something as good as Hamlet.
  • Lennox59:39 reads a C.S. Lewis book whenever he thinks he has achieved something, and is brought down to size.
• Read your model right before you write. A running start carries into the page.
  • Soni44:40 read ten minutes of The Everything Store before writing PayPal each morning, for roughly three and a half years.
  • Michael Connelly16:37 rereads chapter 13 of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister each time he starts a book.
  • The chapter is about five pages with no plot, just Marlowe driving around LA. Connelly moved to LA at 30 and drove its route.

2.6 Where writers disagree

Writers split on how much to read, what era to read, and how much to analyze.

• Read thousands of books, or return to a few. Both camps are right about different jobs.
  • Lee Child49:35 says he has read so much that he has an internal database of plots and structures. He writes one book a year and reads hundreds.
  • Dean Koontz54:50 read about 200 novels a year, yet keeps going back to the same one or two books for inspiration.
  • Zakaria26:30 does both. He skims nonfiction for its central argument, cracking a 600 page book in about two hours, and rereads the few really good ones three times or more.
• Read old books, or read the current field. The answer depends on what you need.
  • The Cultural Tutor19:22 will not read anything published in the last 50 years, because what everyone reads leads them to write the same things.
  • Jon Yaged18:41 says editors who spot the next thing read a lot about the competition.
  • Ted Gioia54:04 reversed the order. He read mostly classics in his youth and shifted to about 80% new work in his 40s, once he had a base.
• Study the craft, or just read and write. Analysis can turn into stalling.
  • Gillian Flynn1:21:04 says reading books about writing can become procrastination, because there is no correct way and at some point you have to write.
  • Michael Dean47:07 says you need to understand how it works in order to eventually get out of your head.
  • Dean's examples: Jerry Garcia practiced scales 10 hours a day, and Picasso copied classical masters early on.
  • Analysis has a cost. Greer says he can no longer read Lord of the Rings for pure fun, because he is always asking what a song is doing there Greer24:23.
• Copy to find your voice, or avoid sounding like anyone else. The line sits between influence and replacement.
  • Pressfield13:30 says copying is how you eventually find your own voice.
  • Greer17:36 says what you want to sound like is just yourself, and reading only the newest books makes you sound like everyone in your generation.
  • Tim Mackie1:27:17 warns you can rearrange borrowed phrases until the result is your own creation, while you still think it is the source. Borrow faithfully so you keep the source's meaning.
  • Cash31:36 says to learn the rules of form before you let them go. Picasso could draw excellent portraits before he left representation behind.