The advice to read like a writer is one of the more frequently repeated recommendations in writing instruction. The advice is broadly correct. The standard interpretation of the advice — pay attention to technique, study how the writer achieves effects, mark passages that exemplify particular devices — misses what actually helps writers develop.
The more useful version of the advice is more specific and harder than the standard interpretation suggests. This essay is about what reading like a writer actually involves and why the standard interpretation falls short.
The standard interpretation
The standard interpretation of read-like-a-writer asks the reader to attend to craft elements while reading. The reader should notice sentence rhythm, word choice, structural decisions, the management of pace and emphasis, the construction of voice. The attention to craft is supposed to develop the reader's capability as a writer through accumulated exposure to how good writing works.
This interpretation has obvious appeal. It seems to convert reading into a productive activity that contributes to writing capability. It can be operationalized through specific practices like marking up passages or keeping commonplace books. It is teachable through writing courses.
The interpretation also has a specific weakness. It tends to produce readers who can identify craft elements without developing the underlying capability that makes those craft elements available to them in their own writing. The identification is a different cognitive operation than the production. Capability in identification does not automatically produce capability in production.
What the standard interpretation misses
The standard interpretation misses that the most important thing reading does for a writer is not technique training but voice formation.
The development of a writer's voice happens substantially through the reading the writer has done. The voice that the writer eventually finds is constructed from elements absorbed across many years of reading, recombined and modified through the writer's own thinking and circumstances, and refined through the writer's own practice. The reading is part of the construction in ways that the writer cannot consciously direct or accelerate.
The technical attention that the standard interpretation emphasizes is happening at the conscious level. The voice formation is happening at deeper levels that conscious attention does not reach. The reader who reads only with technical attention is limiting the part of reading that the standard interpretation can address while not necessarily engaging the deeper voice formation that reading also produces.
The deeper voice formation requires sustained reading that is not primarily for technical purposes. It requires reading that the writer engages with as a reader rather than as a technical analyst. The engagement allows the reading to do the deeper work that the analytical engagement does not produce.
What the more useful version actually requires
The more useful version of read-like-a-writer requires several practices that the standard interpretation does not emphasize.
Read for sustained engagement rather than for analytical extraction. The reading should be the kind of reading the work was written to support — engaged, immersed, responsive to what the work is doing rather than to how it is doing it. The engaged reading is what allows the deeper voice formation to occur.
Read across a wider range than the work the writer intends to produce would suggest. A writer who intends to write essays should read fiction and poetry. A writer who intends to write fiction should read essays and history. The cross-genre reading produces the linguistic resources that within-genre reading alone does not produce.
Read writers from periods earlier than the writer's own. Contemporary writing is necessarily limited in its time-tested craft elements. Earlier writing has been filtered through time in ways that produce resources contemporary writing has not yet earned. The earlier writers have more to teach in some respects than contemporaries do.
Read at multiple paces. Some reading should be slow enough to attend closely to the work. Some reading should be fast enough to absorb the broader rhythms of how works move. Both paces produce different learning. Reading only at one pace produces incomplete development.
Re-read works that have repaid earlier readings. Re-reading produces engagement that first reading does not produce. The work changes as the reader changes. Returning to works across years allows the reader to track both her own development and the work's continued availability to that development.
The voice formation that reading produces
The voice formation that sustained engaged reading produces is largely invisible to the writer while it is happening. The reader does not feel her voice forming during the reading. The voice is forming below the level of conscious awareness.
The formation becomes visible later, when the writer is producing her own work and finds that certain options are available to her that would not have been available without the reading. The sentence rhythms that come naturally to her have been shaped by the rhythms she has read. The argumentative moves that occur to her have been shaped by the moves she has encountered. The tonal range she can occupy has been shaped by the range she has read.
The shaping is not imitation. The voice that emerges is the writer's own. But the materials from which the voice is constructed have been substantially provided by the reading. A writer who has not done sustained reading has fewer materials available and constructs her voice from a smaller set of resources.
This is why some of the most useful reading a writer can do does not feel productive in the moment. The deep reading that engages the work fully without analytical extraction is doing work that the analytical reading is not doing. The work is invisible during its happening but becomes visible across a writing career.
The technical attention that does help
The standard interpretation of read-like-a-writer is not entirely wrong. Technical attention does have a role in the writer's reading. The role is more limited and more specific than the standard interpretation suggests.
Technical attention is most useful for specific problems the writer is currently working on. A writer who is struggling with sentence rhythm benefits from focused attention to how a specific writer manages sentence rhythm. The attention is targeted to the problem rather than diffuse across all craft elements.
Technical attention is also useful in retrospective analysis of work that has affected the writer significantly. A writer who has been moved by a particular passage benefits from understanding how the passage achieves the effect. The analysis is in service of understanding work that has already done its work on the reader, not in lieu of allowing the work to do its work.
Technical attention is least useful as a general posture for all reading. The general posture of analytical extraction interferes with the deeper engagement that produces voice formation. Writers who maintain analytical posture across all their reading get less of the deeper benefit than writers who use analytical posture selectively.
What I tell my students
When I work with writing students I tell them roughly this. Read widely and read deeply. Let yourself be read by the works you are reading. Let the reading do its work without trying to extract its productive value at every moment.
You can attend technically to specific problems you are working on or to specific passages that have moved you and that you want to understand. The technical attention has its uses.
You should not maintain technical attention across all your reading. The technical posture interferes with the deeper engagement that produces the voice formation reading is supposed to support. Writers who read only technically end up with technical knowledge but without the underlying capability that the technical knowledge is supposed to support.
The reading that will most help your writing is the reading you do because you want to be reading the work, not because you are trying to extract craft lessons from it. The craft lessons will come anyway, in the course of the engaged reading, in forms that the analytical extraction cannot produce.
This is the version of read-like-a-writer that has actually helped me develop and that I have seen help students develop. The standard interpretation is not wrong but is incomplete. The complete version is harder to teach because it cannot be reduced to specific practices. But the complete version is what actually produces the writers we are trying to develop.
