Reading Like a Writer

Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.” I realize that this is not as precise a definition as the would-be beautiful-sentence-writer might wish.

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

We concentrate, we skim, we skip words, put down the book and daydream, start over, and reread.

Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no.

I’VE heard the way a writer reads described as “reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory for which author happens to do which thing particularly well.

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing

Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Roth. Here is the sentence that begins Samuel Johnson’s brief biography The Life of Savage.

By now you may be asking: what is a beautiful sentence? The answer is that beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.”

By now you may be asking: what is a beautiful sentence? The answer is that beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.”

is a beautiful sentence? The answer is that beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.”