Learning to Read Like a Writer

"How did the author do that?"

"Wow, I didn't see that coming!"

"How can she always pick just the right word?"

Sound familiar? That's a writer puzzling over her favorite romance novel and wondering how s/he can ever match that author's skill.

A major part of this mystery isn't the author's technique. It's our inability to recognize the technique when we see it.

In other words, we haven't learned to read like a writer.

My first poetry professor, when bombarded with questions like, "How can I ever write a poem that good?" responded with a deceptively simple exercise: Take your favorite poem and rewrite it, substituting your own nouns and verbs and adjectives.

This took me hours to do because it's much, much harder than it sounds. Selecting nouns so I wouldn't write myself into a corner and verbs that wouldn't send my classmates into the floor with laughter was extremely difficult. But hard as it was, the exercise taught me to really look at my favorite author's word choice, cadence, rhyme choices, and images. In one short exercise, I became a better reader.

A similar technique can be used to better understand the structure of popular fiction. Ready to try it? Grab your favorite novel, paper, and pencil.

Step 1: Pick your favorite scene from the novel's first chapter and rewrite it, substituting nouns, adjectives, and verbs of your own.

Don't worry about making logical sense here. The important part is learning to see how sentences are constructed, how they build into paragraphs, and how paragraphs are linked by time, space, an image, a repeated word, action, or a character's thought. Pay attention to things like how much description is used and where, pacing, and how characters are introduced into the story.

Because you're slowing way down -- really looking at each sentence -- you're giving your brain a chance to wrap itself around the words and perhaps see things you wouldn't have seen before, like how to set the mood and weave in description. This is simply a form of reading carefully.

Many newer writers rush their scenes without allowing for proper build-up and without giving the reader a chance to "sink into" the action. This "ground level" exercise can help you see how to slow down the action in your own writing and allow the scene to develop naturally.

But please note: I do not condone plagiarism and this technique is not an invitation to plagiarize! This is an invitation to study a work deeply in order to understand how it functions. Many romance writers have not been formally trained how to study a novel and this technique can be very effective in helping them figure out how a particular scene works. Once you complete the exercise once or twice, you likely will never need it again because your brain will have been "trained."

Step 2: Outline the significant events of the first three chapters.

Here, you're moving from deep in the trenches to about five thousand feet off the ground. How many scenes make up each chapter? Each scene should have one major occurrence or revelation that feeds into the next scene. Does that occurrence or revelation happen early in the scene or late? Which character is most affected by it? Which character has the most to lose and which has the most to gain?

By charting these out, you can begin to see hints of the book's overall pacing. You can also get a sense of how back story feeds into the story without overwhelming it. Back story is a whole other topic and deserves its own article, but suffice it to say that back story, applied judiciously, illuminates motivation and fleshes out the relationships between the main characters and secondary characters.

By chapter 3, you should have a very clear picture of not only the protagonist's goal, motivation, and conflict but his or her plan of action. And you may start seeing obstacles rearing their ugly heads.

So how does this apply to your own story? Create a scene outline of your first three chapters, charting the significant event that occurs in each scene. Count the number of lines of back story you use. Note when characters are introduced.

Do you seem to have many more individual scenes than your model book? Chances are you're rushing the action. Do you have more lines of back story than your model book? It could be you're suffering an info dump or you've started the story in the wrong place. If you have fewer, you might find readers wanting to know more about character motivation.

Step 3: Identify the turning points, dark moment, and climax.

This is the twenty-thousand foot view. It may seem like child's play, but it's not always cut and dried. Turning points -- the points at which protagonists change their courses of action or make fateful decisions -- are not necessarily obvious.

It may help to continue the scene outlining throughout the book, then look at the significant events. Which ones cause the protagonist to make a change? Which ones cause him or her to do something he or she would never have dared or chosen to do before? That usually signals a turning point.

If you've outlined the entire novel, look at where the turning points fall. Are they all grouped together? Are they evenly spaced from each other? Are they sandwiched by action scenes or introspection? What causes these turning points (i.e., what causes the protagonist to change)? What's the progression of the turning points? For example, do these decisions and actions get easier for the protagonist or harder as the book progresses?

At this point you should be able to write a short synopsis for the model book. (But you don't have to!) Again, if you identify these elements -- turning points, dark moment, climax -- in your own book, you can compare your story's progress with the model's to get an idea of whether your story is flowing too quickly or too slowly, or whether you're missing a step.

In conclusion, you can use this technique to study not just pacing and story structure, but character development, subplots, the building of suspense or comedic action -- just about anything you're struggling with. Reading like a writer -- learning to see a novel's elements and how they work together -- makes it easier to learn directly from the text of your favorite authors.