Creative Writing: An Essential Book for Writers by Francine Prose

Whether you are a playwright, novelist, or nonfiction writer, the way to develop your own individual writer's voice is by reading other writers.

This is the premise of Francine Prose's wonderful book Reading Like a Writer. In the book, Prose (one of our country's most respected writers) asserts that the key to successful writing is the careful, slow, and deliberate study of the words and sentences of other great writers, through close reading.

Seems like a radical idea, doesn't it? Sitting through all those English Lit classes in college, weren't we encouraged to breeze through all the classics, crossing off titles on our extensive reading lists in order to crank out a volume of term papers in record time? The idea that we should slow down and savor the great works of literature, taking our time to slowly break them down for their ideas and use of language, seems revolutionary in our culture of "immediate gratification."

Yet this is exactly what Prose suggests we do. It is the diligent, detailed study of the great writers, which makes our own writing great. Reading Like a Writer begins with "Close Reading," Prose's entertaining and insightful observations about how she learned the craft of creative writing by immersing herself in books. But this is not a method of studying literature that encourages speed reading. On the contrary, Prose discovered that a more deliberate style of reading, one that emphasizes the lingering over words, sentences and images in a page by page manner, yields the greatest benefits for writers. It is the slow, close reading of books, not a general discussion of plots and characters or speed reading through a list of "the classics", that helps writers develop their own unique style and voice.