Classic Writing Advice Revisited — Read Everything
Read everything isn’t bad advice. It’s just very imprecise advice.
The great Russian writer and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky once wrote that the world doesn’t need more writers, it needs more readers.
That might seem like dispiriting advice for would-be writers. It’s not. Reading is probably the skill writers devote the least amount of time to. Getting good at reading is in some respects harder than getting good at writing. We are so used to skim reading or wading through texts that almost by happenstance we don’t learn how to read attentively.
Writing makes you a better reader because once you know how a complex piece of text is assembled then as you read you are disassembling it to see how it works. By becoming a good reader you can preempt this by learning in advance of your own attempts at writing how professionals construct a text.
And books are works of assemblage. In a creative sense, writing is (to paraphrase Percy Shelley) about innovating upon the combinations of writers and thinkers you have been influenced by. But the work of writing is in a very real sense an act of construction. Plugging in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters into a word document is not glamorous and it does feel like work when you’re doing it. You should get suspicious if it starts feeling too easy.
How do you learn how to read well?
To quote another great Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, good reading is rereading. Unlike music, painting, or sculpture, we don’t experience literature in one go. Your reaction to the Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s Fifth will be instantaneous. But to experience Jane Eyre will require hours of dedication. Then to understand how Jane Eyre works will require multiple readings.
As Nabokov put it:
In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.
My advice would be to find a book you love, a book you don’t mind reading over and over again, and read it relentlessly. Disaggregate it. Break it down by section, chapter, and page. Really try and understand how the book works and how it produces such a hold on the reader. The fact that you love the book shows the book has succeeded. Now you need to reverse engineer this process to uncover the origins of its success.
Which brings me back to another great line from Viktor Shklovsky: that a writer ought to be both a fish and an ichthyologist. A writer writes and they are also an anatomist of writing.
My other practical piece of advice about reading is to become more structured in how you read. In my view there are four types of reading:
- Reading for pleasure
- Reading for research
- Reading for craft
- Reading for industry knowledge
You should be able to do some of these simultaneously. For instance, if you are researching a historical novel set in Jazz Age Manhattan then reading The Great Gatsby should tick boxes 1, 2, and 3.
In a sense all reading is reading for craft, because when reading any book you should be keeping track of whether it is succeeding and why. Sometimes gorging on great writing makes you forget that there is plenty of average writing in circulation. If you’re reading an academic book for research and it’s boring you to tears then that’s a learning opportunity. The book shouldn’t have to be boring, yet it is. Why? It is unlikely that the author intended to bore the reader — but they have. Here’s an opportunity to break down why that piece of writing has failed.
Box 4, reading for industry knowledge, is perhaps the thing most writers do least. Publishers are interested in the here and now; readers are often obsessed with writers who are either long dead or well-established. There’s nothing wrong with this. Most editors I’ve met studied literature at university and started out in publishing because they loved books.
But publishing isn’t about venerating the canon. It’s about finding, developing, and promoting new authors. Above all, publishers are chasing the zeitgeist. Sales figures don’t lie. They tell a story about what people are interested in right now. Publishers are often mocked for chasing trends but in all reality they don’t have much of a choice. If customers are buying colouring-in books, or YA by Youtubers, or vegan cookbooks it’s very hard to explain why you as a book publisher would refuse to countenance publishing such books.
The same is true at the literary end of the spectrum. Publishers of literary fiction aren’t looking for the next Mary McCarthy, they’re looking for the next Sally Rooney. This holds across genres. Publishers of smart thinking and ‘ideas’ books are looking for the next Yuval Noah Harari. Publishers of nature and travel writing are looking for the next Robert Macfarlane.
You need to be fluent in contemporary publishing in order to navigate the treacherous world of acquisitions, the mysterious process by which publishers acquire new books to publish.
Like writing that is a skill that can be tended to. And, like writing, it is a skill that you can develop by thinking intelligently about how and what you read.
