READ LIKE A WRITER

By Kasie Whitener

This is a summary of my talk given at The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s Lowcountry Book Club Convention on October 6, 2018.

Voraciously. Inquisitively. Judgmentally. That’s how to read like a writer.

My first book addiction was VC Andrews. I read everything I could get my hands on and not from the library, either. Each fat paperback cost $4.95 at the grocery store. The covers were these haunting graphics of scared young women. They were gothic family drama novels and I couldn’t get enough of them.

Reading voraciously is part of being a writer. Exploring other worlds, savoring word choices, character builds, and plot arcs are all part of being addicted to storytelling. Just as professional athletes hit the gym daily and politicians are always campaigning, writers learn their craft by immersing themselves in it.

All this reading is an investigation. Like a detective in a mystery novel, I’m assembling the clues as to what makes a novel readable, bingeable, and ignore-my-family good.

I read genre fiction to learn the conventions and expectations of the genre. Genre novels satisfy their readers by playing out their story according to specific patterns. We talked extensively about this on Write On SC episode 12.

I read literary novels to see how the greats are playing with the form. Awards like National Book Award and Pulitzer and Man Booker identify writers working at the top of the craft.

Toni Morrison advised we write the book we want to read. In scholarship, this is called finding the gap in the knowledge. We know A and we know C but B is unknown, so we must investigate. For writers, this is the sense that although you enjoyed the book you’ve just finished, it could have been better. You would have done some things differently.

Investigation can mean identifying a specific theme and working through a list of books associated with it. For a while I read every World War II novel I could get my hands on which meant seeing the Great War in every theatre including Shanghai, Charleston, Paris, Massachusetts, England and England again, occupied France in this novel and again in this novel, even Australia.

Judge the novel. How did it begin? I picked up a book recently that began with a character on a plane (cliché) and just as I thought to forgive the author, she began the second chapter with a second character being woken up by an alarm (another cliché). If every man is devastatingly handsome and every woman has a tinge of self-doubt, if the personal conflict just happens to mirror the external conflict, if the dialogue is wasted on greetings like, “What’s up?” and “How’ve you been?” just close the book. Mark it as “never finished” on Goodreads. Give it back to the Kindle Unlimited library.

You can expect better. There are so many books out there, we can never read them all. So we don’t have to settle for the one that Book Bub or Amazon or a mailing list or even our local librarian foisted upon us. Know when to bail.