Reading is joy
Also, do you know what a group of writers is called?
When I worked at UNC, I checked out a lot of books. Like, tons. I loved working next to a university library, which had fewer demands on new fiction and all kinds of academic and obscure texts that fed my research habit. I sat in my office and (compulsively?) put books on hold, waiting with excitement as somebody went up to the stacks to pull my requested titles, darting from my desk as soon as I got the email saying Your books are ready for pick up!
Because I checked out lots of weird books, I was often the first person to check out many titles, which meant I had the pleasure of watching the work study student get out the glue stick and adhere a new checkout card to the book, which they satisfying stamped with the due date. I love that stamp, the bulbous handle, the way the numbers roll forward and leave their neat mark on the card.
Sadly for me, the university went all digital. Checkout now is by bar code, and if you need to know the due date, you look it up in your record. (And if you are me, you don’t have to look—the answer is always OVERDUE).
I miss the library cards a lot. I miss looking at the previous due dates and wondering who else checked out the book, held it in their hands, read it in bed or over lunch. So, in an effort to recapture some of that lost joy, I made a thing:
Reader, I made a stamp. I stamped all the books I brought to the writers’ meetup to give away. And I stamped some little free library volumes that are going back in the box, ready for someone else to enjoy. Stories are meant to be shared. I hope one day we’ll have a slightly clearer record of all the people these books connect as they journey through the world.
Free books with fun stamps wasn’t the only delightful part of the writers’ meet up. We also solved a very important problem, namely what to call a group of writers:
My friend, you are a part of a scratch of writers. I’m so glad you’re here.
Before I get to this week’s thoughts on reading for paid subscribers, I want to remind you that Live Storytelling starts at the Carrboro ArtsCenter on January 25th. It’ll be much more entertaining than Netflix.
Writing is joy, reading is joy, storytelling is joy…I hope wherever you are, you’re feeling some joy. If not, keep your eye on the horizon. There’s a little more light every day.
I am, I regret to inform you, not reading anything good. I actually haven’t read anything good in what feels like a while. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about what I do when I’m reading a book that doesn’t blow me away.
First thing I do if I’m really not into a book is…put it down. I’ve met a lot of people who cringe at this. Finishers, I call them. Finishers believe you have to finish everything you start. I disagree. Sometimes there is great wisdom in saying, “This is not for me” and moving on to something else that might be. Life is short. Too short to read books you’re not enjoying.
That’s what I did recently with Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. It’s a good story. The characters are interesting. It’s well written. But it didn’t grab me. So I put it down.
There are many times, though, when I’m reading something that I don’t love but I have a reason for plowing through. The most common reason is someone has told me the book has some element that’s worth looking at—it might be an unusual structure, a fantastic plot, an unforgettable character, or some other element of writing that I, as a writer, might enjoy and/or benefit from looking at. These books I won’t put down, even if I’m not in love. I’ll motor through them, using a specific approach.
I call it ripping the seams.
When I was a kid, I learned how to sew—I took some classes, I made some things. But I wasn’t great at it. I made a lot of mistakes. Which meant I ripped open a lot of seams.
The books we hold in our hands are finished products. They are the quilt after all the assembly and binding has happened. But seeing a beautiful finished product doesn’t help us as writers. To figure out how the author made it, we have to rip the seams open, tear it apart until we’ve broken the story down to its basic parts. After that, we can figure out how the author assembled those parts to create the whole.
Here are some or all of the questions I ask when I’m ripping seams:
How does the book open? What images and language does the author use in the opening that might hint at the theme or plot of the story?
How are the characters introduced and established? What details, gestures, and anecdotes does the author use to convey character?
Where is the backstory? How much is there? At what moments does the author pivot from the front story to the backstory? How do they get in and out of those moments?
Where do I want to do know more? How has the author created that mystery? When in the text are the answers to my questions revealed?
What’s the structure of the story? Is it a classic 3 act, or is it doing something more inventive and unconventional? Are there big plot twists or reveals in the story? What page are they on?
How is the imagery, language, and/or setting working? Is the author using those aspects of the text to convey theme, foreshadow, or deepen character?
If this sounds a lot like what you did in high school English class, well, it is. Except instead of writing a paper on what you’ve discovered, you can use those tools in your own writing.
While MFAs are all the rage in some circles, most people who publish books don’t go to school to learn how to write. They learn how to write by reading what other writers have written. Here’s Francine Prose, from her book Reading Like a Writer:
I learned to write by writing and…by reading books…pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made…what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.…novels and stories [were] wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.”
A lot of writers starting out assume that the most talented writers sit down and produce airtight, flawless, gorgeous texts. That perfect stories simply emerge from their fingertips fully formed. What those newbies don’t realize right away is every single thing on the page is a conscious choice. Shadowing authors and those choices can teach us a whole helluva lot.
Here are a few examples from my own seam ripping.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid. This novel, about a glamorous Elizabeth Taylor–type movie star telling her story at the end of her life, is a bit more mainstream than I usually read. But people raved about it and somebody mentioned it contained some elements that might be useful to me in the book I’m writing. So I dove in.
The book begins with Hugo summoning the narrator, a “lower-level writer” at a magazine—the only person she will tell her life story to. The narrator is befuddled—why could Hugo choose someone so unimportant to carry out the task of telling her story? As the reader, I was asking the same question.
The narrator presses her, but Hugo never really explains herself. The narrator gives up on understanding and simply accepts the job. Those of us who have actually read books before won’t let that point go so easily. To us, it’s an obvious signpost that the writer is connected to Hugo in some way, which will probably be revealed dramatically later in the book. Which it does—it comes toward the end of the book, in the Finale section (according to the Save the Cat model of story structure). There’s also a big shocker about Hugo that comes…right at the midpoint. If you start to look for basic story shapes, you’ll see them everywhere.
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel. Thankfully every story is not as formulaic as that one. For the Jupiter retreat, I ripped the seams on Station Eleven, which was quite a task—it’s one of the most complexly structured novels I have undertaken. There are a lot of characters, which means a lot of storylines, and a lot of jumping through time. So I went through and labeled each section, saw how St. John Mandel interwove characters and past and present. Unraveled, it actually all made a lot of sense, and I could imagine her writing the story more or less in chronological order and then chopping it up and rearranging it, sort of the opposite of making a quilt.
One surprise that came out of this process was about the front story, Kirsten’s narrative about trying to find her friend Charlie, whom they’d left behind a year earlier when Charlie was too pregnant to travel. I remembered this as the driving storyline of the book. But when I ripped the seams, I saw that, although it’s an important storyline, it does not take up a ton of page space. There is much more on the unfolding of the pandemic and Arthur and Jeevan’s back stories as there is on Kirsten. But you might not notice that if you didn’t look closely.
Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead. Let me be clear about this one: I never wanted to put this book down. And I hold Whitehead in a league of his own—I don’t try to understand how his books work because they are so incredibly out of my league, about places and times and people I do not have the courage or skill to represent on the page, written with a thoroughly virtuosic command of the English language I will never attain. I’m fine with that. We need geniuses.
But a real funny thing happened when I read Harlem Shuffle. I got totally swept up in the story and characters, motoring through the book, enjoying the rich language and well crafted details on character and setting. I didn’t read the table of contents or wonder about the structure until I got to the end of part two. Part one was roughly the first hundred pages of the book. Part two was about another hundred pages. Want to guess how long part three was? Yep. A hundred or so pages. It’s a simple three-act structure. A classic for a reason.
In addition to being shocked at the simplicity of the structure, I had another experience you may have had and one I am certain you are capable of, which is anticipating an ending. When the structure works, when the story is balanced and satisfying, we can feel an ending coming. And I don’t mean the battle scene is over, so the end must be soon. Yes, there will be plot to resolve, but if you look past that, if you pay deep attention to the characters, you can feel them coming to rest somewhere different from where they started. Often there’s actually a physical settling—whatever sensations got kicked up in my body from excitement and intrigue start to wane, which means the ending is coming. Try it the next time you watch a show: see if you can feel in your body when the ending is coming.
I had a professor in graduate school who said that studying writing would take the joy out of reading forever. That we’d long for the days when we didn’t have an analytical writer brain that got in the way of kicking back and simply enjoying a book.
Years on, I don’t think he was completely right. It IS hard for me to get swept up in a book, truly carried away, but it does happen, and not infrequently (see: Fates and Furies (Lauren Groff), Fleishman is in Trouble (Taffy Brodesser-Akner), Now is Not the Time to Panic (Kevin Wilson)). The truth is, I have a kind of bisected brain—I can get swept away by a story and its characters and I can scrutinize it too, rip the seams apart and see just how exactly that author put together such an engrossing tale. In fact, I usually appreciate it more when I can see how it was built.
So the next time you’re enjoying a book—or not enjoying a book—slow down and ask some or all of the questions above. You might be surprised at how much becomes clear if you take some time to rip the seams.
I love that stamp! 🤩 And I added Harlem Shuffle to my TBR. Better late than never.