Changes to Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who... by Francine Prose

Added a quotation: “It's a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. These are works you can turn to whenever you feel that your own style is getting a little slack or lazy or vague. You can open such books anywhere and read a sentence that will move you to labor longer, try harder, to return to that trouble spot and rework that imprecise or awkward sentence until it is something to be proud instead of something you hope that the reader wont' notice.”

Added a quotation: “Like most... maybe all... writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.”

Edited: This book teaches one how to read like a writer in order to become a better writer that others can enjoy.

Added: This book teaches one how to read like a writer to become a better writer that others can enjoy.

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In Reading Like a Writer , Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers&#8212Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov&#8212and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch . She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (edit title)