Read Better Than You Write

My wife Carol used to pull her hair out when we’d watch TV thrillers or, even worse, sit in a theater. Why? Because I’d predict how the rest of the show would play out based on one or two lines of dialogue or a single property on the set.

I first did it to her while we were dating during the Dennis Quaid movie D.O.A.. The moment Daniel Stern handed Dennis Quaid the blue cup, I leaned over and whispered to her, “He put the poison in the cup to steal a manuscript.” (We actually bought the cup at a set sale later.)

She thought I was full of shit, but that was exactly how it played out. How did I know? Because I don’t watch shows passively, I study them to see how the screenwriters set up the characters and plots. I want to know what devices work, how they foreshadow events and how they hide the resolution of the plot. I want them to teach me to do my job better.

Now Carol plays the game with me and it actually makes watching shows, and reading more enjoyable. We don’t just follow clues, we follow how well the writers construct the devices that present the clues to the viewers/readers.

This may seem like a strange foothold into the topic of reading better than you write. In fact, you read better to train for your own book.

Today’s indie writers let the market dictate their writing decisions: pick your genre, target your audience and stick to them. How do you select your audience and genre? Probably by the genre you prefer.

Sure, you can stray from those boundaries once you establish your series. If you write paranormal romance, you can play with paranormal fantasy or fantasy romance. Odds are, however, you write those genres because you read them. You may read other genres but you’ll stick close to home. Writers, like their audiences, don’t stray far from their comfort zones.

You’ll make exceptions. We all do. A friend will sell you on a novel with a pitch that hooks you,* you may find yourself compelled to read the latest best-seller, or you swap a read with another indie author for an online review. If we’re honest, however, few of us really like to push our boundaries when it comes to books.

We read to relax, we read for entertainment. We left school behind us, so we certainly don’t read to learn. And this is the worst attitude for authors, especially indie authors to cop.

Read strategically
I read every book the same way, not just mysteries. I want to know how the author constructs her characters, pits them against each other, spins her plots, resolves her conflicts, ties up the small details. I study the language, the metaphors (or lack of them). Is his voice unique or generic, his dialogue witty or dull, and, most important, does he employ a device or technique I haven’t seen before.

You may think I’m kidding. My question to you is: How seriously do you take your writing? Do you want to sell books, or do you want to become a good, even great writer? In my mind, whichever reason motivates you, you need to study the best to reach the top of your profession. These writers not only sold books, they continue to sell books.

They continue to sell books because readers believe they’re great writers.

When my college lit teachers forced me to read books I didn’t want to read, I did so begrudgingly. Sure, I admitted, Conan Doyle wrote some good stuff, Mary Shelly and Mark Twain, but did I really need to read Tess of the Dubervilles and Emma or wade through the mundane mind of Madame Bovary and the tedious musings of Remembrance of Things Past? And why the hell did I have to suffer through Chaucer in the Middle English?‡

I didn’t have to, of course. Like many students I could have sloughed my assignments and coasted, but I chose to read them and discovered how pleasurable they could be. Well, most of them. Including Emma (Thomas Hardy, not so much). As the assignments piled up I discovered a number of writers I enjoyed, many of whom I continue to hold dear even in my sixties. Including writers I previously ignored as pompous, or, even worse, frivolous.

For instance, for some reason, I got it into my head in high school that reading Kurt Vonnegut was a complete waste of time. I can remember the moment. It was the moment I saw the picture of the asshole asterisk in Breakfast of Champions.

Vonnegut’s immortal asshole/asterisk
from ”Breakfast of Champions”

One of my stoner buddies showed it to me with a hash smoke releasing giggle as we sat in his closet thinking we would be sheltered from discovery by his mother should she wander into his bedroom and somehow fail to notice the light behind the doorway or the haze of residual smoke. Seeing that picture was enough to convince me Vonnegut was the reading material of mush-brained morons. Mind you I smoked as much as he did (largely in rebellion against my Baptist Preacher father), but he considered his stash of underground comics to be the high point of Western literature. Under the influence of of cheap Mexican weed I found the furry freak brothers frightfully funny too, but I knew Larry would never scale the first two pages of Catch-22. (see footnote‡)

By finishing my assignments I discovered the caustic wit of Flannery O’Connor (whom I will discuss in greater detail later), the playful prose of Donald Barthelme and the dense prose of Roland Barthes and Robert Coover. My feminist lit teacher browbeat us with Sylvia Path, Anne Sexton and Doris Lessing, every one of whom could write circles around half the male writers advocated by the male professors who mocked them.

I consider Lessing and O’Connor two of the finest writers of the century, and Lessing’s Shikasta series the best example of science fiction written. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem taught me how to write the literary essay.°

During my course on novels I was assigned Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and I fell in love with the novel as an art form. Humbolt’s Gift moved me so much I sat at my typewriter and finished my first novel. I’d played with them, had a hundred page satire in my bedroom at my parents’ house that was a structural disaster, but this was my first real novel with three acts, a real protagonist, awareness of literary themes and poetic devices. It’s shit (although I still have it on the bottom of a shelf somewhere) but I finished it it one semester.

I finally learned to write because I quit reading to entertain myself and began to study books to see how the authors wrote them. I went on to discover Tom Robbins, John Updike John Irving (another writer I’d avoided) and Bernard Malamud (including his wonderful novel The Natural) Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I strayed south of the border to explore Carlos Fuentes and Garcia Marquez.

Then there was Joyce, whom I have yet to decide is worth all the bother. Yes, I read Portrait and Ulysses twice through. I made it halfway through Finnegan’s Wake, but life intervened. I tried again ten years ago, but life intervened even sooner. At times I think he deserved his reputation, and when it comes to mastery of the language, he does. But overall, truthfully, most of the time I think that, had they not banned Ulysses, he would be regarded no more highly than Samuel Beckett (which is still an honor).

I devoted my craft to Borges and two authors who hated each other: Hemingway and Faulkner. I copied Borges for his magical fantasy, Hemingway and Faulkner for their contrast in style. This may seem counterintuitive, but I had to try.

Hemingway provides a study in stark simplicity. So stark and so simple that his prose is often mocked and parodied. Yet young writers would do well to study him to see how he moves a story with a handful of words. He began his career as a journalist at a time when the industry was changing. Where papers once paid writers by the word, his stories went over the wire in wartime and words were at a premium.

Faulkner’s prose was as lush as the plantation landscapes in the deep south he memorialized. Hemingway preferred to portray his characters in a sketch, Faulkner in a labyrinth of prose. You can get lost in a paragraph which can stretch across pages. One of his best novels, As I Lay Dying is nothing more than sleight of hand as he distracts the reader for the length of his book from his characters’ true motivations.

In grad school my thesis advisor introduced me to Walker Percy and Love in the Ruins. I fell in love with that book and it remains my favorite. I’ve returned to the well more than any book besides the Bible. Soon after Gravity’s Rainbow fell into my hands and Pynchon and Percy sit side-by-side on my shelf as the two authors who most influence my writing.**

(When I finally bring my two personal masterpieces to light for publication and quit tweaking them, they will bear the earmarks of those early influences, especially Pynchon and Percy. For now though, they remain the early works of a writer learning his craft and not masterpieces at all, precisely because they were so heavily influenced by the authors who taught me so much.)

Flannery O’Connor: A Case Study
When I taught college lit, I loved to push students into the pool with O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The story provides a great working model for young writers as well, if only because she deceives writers so well, many of whom miss the point entirely. (If you haven’t read the story, I suggest you follow the link and read it now. Or, your can be a typical college student and take my word for it, which was something I always told my students to never do)

O’Connor typically has two types of readers, naive and discerning. The type of reader you are will influence the type of writer you become. Here is the story in broad strokes:

A grandmother and her family leave for vacation in Florida even though she tries to talk them out of it. A killer named “The Misfit” is on the loose and she fears they might encounter him in Florida. She hides her cat in a box because she doesn’t want to leave it at home. As they travel through Georgia she convinces them to take a side road to visit an abandoned mansion, which, in turn causes them to wreck the car when the cat escapes the box.

When a car approaches they believe they will be rescued, but the grandmother immediately recognizes them as the Misfit’s party. The grandmother and the Misfit commiserate over the cruelties of the world as his cohorts execute the family. He kills the grandmother last, lamenting she would have been a good woman “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This line should be the lens through which we understand the story, but many readers gloss over it. I suspect this marks the first distinguishing feature between naive and and discerning readers. The two readers experience two entirely different stories. Let’s walk through them:

The naive reader’s version
A well-meaning grandmother warns her family that they should avoid a Florida vacation because a criminal called the Misfit is on the loose. When they make her go, she has to smuggle the cat in a box so she isn’t left uncared for. Her son doesn’t treat her well, and when she suggests the family visit a plantation she saw as a child, she has to fudge some facts to get them to visit.

Unfortunately, the car goes off the road and the cat escapes, causing it to crash. When the a car passes by, they ask for help. Unfortunately, the grandmother recognizes the passengers as the Misfit’s crew. The Misfit pretends to be nice to the grandmother while he executes her family, then he kills her anyway. He makes a cruel joke that she would have been good if someone had killed her every minute of her life.

The discerning reader’s version
The grandmother is a busybody who meddles in everybody’s business using flimsy rationalizations to justify her behavior. When her son wants to go to Florida, she tries to talk him out of it by claiming the Misfit will be there (which we know from later in the story, he’s not). She deliberately hides the cat from her family because it “might turn the gas stove on,” which is perhaps the most preposterous rationalization imaginable.

When she wants to visit the plantation, she lies outright about hidden treasure and secret panels to whip the children into a frenzy until her son has no choice but to relent. And when she does realize she has no idea where the plantation is (or if she even remembers it correctly), she refuses to tell anyone so they can turn back. Nor is it any surprise that the cat, who has no business being stuffed in a box, escapes and attacks the father at the worst moment, causing the car wreck.

The grandmother doesn’t know when to shut up either, as evidenced by the fact that at the moment she should most keep quiet she immediately announces the identity of the Misfit. Were it not for that, the family might have been robbed, but escaped with their lives. And, just in case we missed O’Connor’s point, the story closes with the Misfit exchanging his own rationalizations with the grandmother to justify his own criminalization while she twitters on, allowing her family to be brutally executed. She repeatedly tells the Misfit what a good Christian man he is, deluding herself into believing her life might be spared even while her family is being executed.

I learned more about writing from this story than a semester of creative writing classes. Hyperbole? Yes and no. I can certainly say the story encapsulates the lessons of a semester: plot structure, characterization, and dialogue. The language rolls of my tongue, some of the best southern dialogue in fiction and it’s not because she’s a southern writer. I can think of a dozen southern writers who sound as hoaky as molasses on corn pone.

You’ll never learn these skills in the pages of a fast read tea cozy or paranormal romance. You can catch a hint in Raymond Chandler, but he learned working side-by-side with Faulkner hacking out screenplays in Hollywood. I’m not knocking tea cozies. Nor are they devoid of great writers in their own right.

Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is deliciously wicked and exceptionally well written. Some readers will scream to hear me say this, but he’s a better writer than Rowling. I count Bradley among the authors I learn from.

Nor do I dismiss the potboilers. I learn as much from the bad books as well. As much as I love Stephen King, and I do love to read King, half of the items on my “don’t do” list come from his books.

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Postscriptural
Let me close with a final recommendation, the book that lies at the heart of American literature and civilization, whether or not we choose to admit it. Every writer owes a debt to the Bible and you need to read it, preferably the King James. (If it helps to have a more modern translation as well, go for it, but the language of the King James is embedded in American and English Lit).

I’m not evangelizing, and I’m asking anyone to read it for a spiritual message. As writers you should read it to find stories handed down over time, and to discover, to your surprise, how much you’ve gotten wrong. For instance, did you know that Mario Puzo ripped off the Godfather from the Old Testament? The climactic scene where Michael Corlene removes his father’s enemies during his son’s baptism comes straight from the ascension of Solomon to his throne.

The Book of Revelation, the Book of Job, the sacrifice of Isaac, the gospel stories and parables, the Psalms, the Proverbs have all been woven into the tapestry of the books we read. So much so that they’ve become transparent, and yet we depend on them. I’ve read it a dozen times, marked up four different Bibles over forty-five years, and use those stories often—usually without letting readers know where they came from. (Half the time my Christian family members and friends don’t know.)

And the best part is, you’ll encounter more NC-17 tales of adultery, incest, fornication, battle and bloodthirsty murder than between the covers of any other printed pages. Because you need those things to move any good plot to redemption.
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*recall that pitch and the qualities sold you because you should use those qualities in your own book descriptions.

‡Yes, we, all discovered the bawdy parts of Chaucer, the Miller’s Tale, for instance, but do we need to relive in the Middle English? Well, this depends. I discovered a little known gem of language, that the word “quaint,” comes from “queynte” which was the Middle English word for “cunt,” which comes straight from Chaucer. Yes, a fact they hid from us in high school, and probably sophomore college English as well. So, hold on to your hats, you few feminists who still survive. The word “quaint” is a masculine stereotype used to ridicule women by reducing what is being described to the equivalent of a vagina. And that little tidbit, to me at least, was worth the sixty thousand dollars I am still paying off in interest on my student loans. (The last sentence would would be an example of hyperbole.)

To extend this footnote into total digression, however, I had stumbled onto a few literary works well before college, or even high school. For instance, I found a copy of Catch-22 in the eighth grade on the grocery store book shelf, which might seem like a lot for an eighth grader to tackle, but I had already seen my mother reading James Clavell's Taipan and tried that. When I discovered some of the scenes people underline in that book, I realized those thick books might have something worth reading them for. (I hadn’t discovered pulp paperbacks yet.) Hence, the 25 cent investment in Catch-22, which paid of well in that regard. However, I enjoyed it so much I even took it with me to read in church, which caused no end of a scandal when the deacons found out the son of the pastor was openly reading an anti-war screed during the in 1967. I was still on my father’s shit list from the time my third grade friends ratted me out for reading the library’s copy of Frankenstein. Rather than being happy that I was reading above my level, or acknowledging that the book was, in fact from the public library, the deacons were in a furor that I was reading a copy of a book with a wood carving illustration depicting a woman’s bare breast.

To add to this story, however, the budding writer in me became so intrigued by the use of multiple flashbacks that I paid careful attention whenever I encountered them in the future. I should also add that I wrote my thesis on the book and was able to demonstrate that Milo Minderbender turned a handsome profit selling eggs at a loss. The paper was lost in my divorce, and I no longer remember how I did it, but, I know for a fact that it was possible.

°I’m steering away from my discovery of poets and poetry, which also swept me off my feet, only because fiction became my greater love and poetry only a casual affair.

**Quite frankly if you asked me to choose between Pynchon and Joyce as the heavyweight champion, the writer who produces pound for pound, based on Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses, I would go with Pynchon.