How to read

Reading as a writer is as different from reading for pleasure as it is from reading for scholarly or practical reasons.

Reading for craft, as writers do, is has more in common with the way curious children play than it does with other ways of reading. Reading for craft is like disassembling a small motor to see how it runs—there’s no better way to understand the workings of literary machinery.

Of course you can still read for the joy of it. But if you love a sentence or a scene on your first reading, why not reread it carefully to see how its author achieved the effect they created?

You can learn a lot by simply observing the language of a piece, its phrasing and sentence structure, the way the sentences are combined into paragraphs, and the way they sound and feel when you read them aloud.

You can learn by writing, too. Copying a sentence or paragraph out by hand will amplify what you understand about its method and effects.

As you read, make a record of what you discover. Devote a notebook to passages you admire and writing discoveries you make. One day it may be your most valuable writing tool.

Next time: How to revise