Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (P.S.),   ISBN:9780060777050

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Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Wrote Them" belongs on every writer's bookshelf. After reading it, you'll catch yourself reading in a new, more careful manner. Ms. Prose teaches us to slow down and notice each word choice, the structure of each sentence and paragraph, the way the individual authors choose to show characterization. I highly recommend this book.

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Dear readers,

The most valuable hints for writers pertain to careful word usage and sentence structure (the first few chapters of the book). I have read a few 'how to' books about creative writing and none have touched on the importance of a good paragraph. This is the best book yet on this area of writing. However, I did find the section on dialogue pretty tedious and skipped over much of this, as it seemed to reduce itself to an opinion of an author backed up by excerpts to prove the opinion. If I want this, I read literary criticism. Overall, though, worth the read.

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Francine Prose posits that she has a new angle on things: instead of falling to the hegemony of writer's workshops, people who want to write should learn to write by reading great literature. Shocking!... until one remembers that this is how things were always done in the days before MFAs. Once this is considered, the book has substantially less to offer than first appears. This isn't to say that Prose says nothing interesting or useful, only that she says little that's revolutionary. She also has an unfortunate habit of giving long passages and, instead of picking them apart in a way that really provides useful information from a writing point of view, simply recounts what happened--as if readers of the book were too stupid to understand by themselves. All of these criticisms aside, the book has interesting moments. Is it worth buying? Maybe, for someone who is only beginning to think about literature and writing. Otherwise, it's a book that you can borrow from the library, read through quite quickly, and return safe in the knowledge that you've had all that's to be glossed from its pages.

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I read this for a creative writing course. After reading many "handbooks" on writing over the past few years, I can say that this was the first that went beyond nuts and bolts issues of technique to provide a perspective on the writer's point of view itself as subject matter. It made me conscious of my reading process, and has changed how I read. I can see now that I used to read mainly for plot. Events and actions made immediate sense to me. Now I read for the pleasures of character and style as well. Prose does an excellent job of describing an abstract process like reading. Recommended for writers, and those readers who are interested in how writers think.

Customer Rating: 

Love for literature can easily become an affectation. If a stranger or an acquaintance comes up to you and says something like "good literature can be appreciated down to every single word..." you'll probably dismiss the person as a pedantic-snobbish-pompous moron. When Francine Prose does it (with a better choice of words, of course), she makes you believe her and pay attention to her. She writes with such sincerity and candidness that you drop your cynicism and enjoy the ride as she exalts writers you do or don't know/like. Suffice it to say, she's next to E.M. Foster's Aspects of the Novel in my shelf.