Today, as part of learning how to write to be read, we're going to talk about how to read to become a better writer. This to me is one of the great joys of being a writer, is the opportunity, and the encouragement, and the necessity of reading other people, and reading widely, and deeply, and even uncomfortably. Natalie Goldberg says, "If you want to be a peach, eat a lot of peaches." By which she means, if you want to be a writer, read a lot of writers. So, whatever your own preference, if you like Jane Austin, I suggest you go read Stephen King. If you like Stephen King, go read Percival Everett. If you like the Bronte's, go read Philip Dick. It's a big, big universe of literature out there and part of your job is not only to empathize with your characters, but to empathize with other characters, characters that already exist in other literatures, in other books, in other canons. What you want as a writer is not just to reinforce your own biases, and your own beliefs, and not just to read people whose stance, whose values, whose attitudes, mirror your, but also people who represent widely divergent points of view because part of what you're looking for is the good sentence. Your task is, how can I be a better writer? So, whenever I'm reading a novel by somebody else or an essay by somebody else, I say to myself, "Look at that sentence." I read it the first time for my own pleasure because I was a reader long before I was a writer. The second time, I read it to see, how they built it? How did they build their house? How did they approach this essay? How did they use humor? How did they use digression that loops around and brings you back to the point? Why did they place that anecdote there in the essay? Those are all things you can learn by studying other people's work, but the first time you should read it just as a reader. I remember, when I was growing up and I was working my way through from A to C, the books in the library, one of the things that I regularly experienced both with fiction and nonfiction was that feeling of transportation. That I was no longer on the dusty floor of the around public library, I was now on the raft, on the beach, on the beach head in the middle of World War two, on the couch in the New York madam's, board Delo, which was her autobiography, which I found needless to say, trans fixing. Those are all the opportunities that you have as a writer to see all the different ways of approaching material. So, one of the things that I like to do when I am looking at the work of other writers, after as I say you read for pleasure, is to make notes. Although lots of people like to make notes in books, which I think is often the sign of a really engaged, and committed reader and lovely, I also have a pad of paper and I make notes. I will write down the persuasive sentence. Then, when I've finished reading the essay, I will look at the persuasive sentence again and think, what's the rhythm of that like? How does the writer connect with me? So, one of the things that, for example, the last line of Jane Eyre, "Reader, I married him." What is it about that, that makes it such a terrific and powerful ending? One of the things I observe is that it is the direct address to the reader. That's something you have great opportunity for in a personal essay in which you've been telling your narrative, and then in some sense you turn, and speak to the reader. It's always effective. So, you might learn from that. The tricks of great fiction writers are also available to you as great essays, not to mention the tricks of great personal essays, but sometimes it can be a little distracting, if you're working on your own personal essay to read other wonderful personal essays because so much of that is the content of the experience, which is unique to the writer. But I would encourage you not to be distracted by that, to keep saying to yourself, "If you want to be a peach, eat a lot of peaches." Eat peaches from other countries, eat peaches from other centuries, eat peaches that are set in the future, eat peaches that are written by people with whom you have nothing in common, and still look for what moves you, what amuses you, what stays with you after you close the pages because that's what you want to have in your own work. So, as you're working through your list and you've written down the persuasive sentence, you might also sit back a little bit and take a look at the overall structure of the essay. Where do they begin? I usually say, you don't want to begin at the beginning, you want to begin in the middle. To begin at the beginning is to have to front load a lot of information. What Ursula Le Guin's refers to as the expository lump, a subject on which we will be spending a lot of time, next time.
