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.
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