How to read like a novelist

*reread

Hello friends—

Periodically the dumbest of all literary discourses surfaces around “whether writers need to read.” Under the breathtaking stupidity of the question itself the second-worst part of this too uncontestedly flies: the implication that reading is a monolithic activity. It’s not.

If you want to be a writer of any kind, let alone a writer of fiction, “reading” in its broadest, information-gleaning sense is necessary but insufficient. The legitimate dialectical questions here are what to read and how to read. The former is (understandably!) talked to death. But the latter I think less so.

The following lays out my approach—or rather, collection of approaches—to reading novels with an explicit eye to writing them. It shouldn’t be taken either as an exhaustive taxonomy or the only effective methodology for novelistic reading, but it’s what’s worked for me since before I realized I’d been reading so strategically.

Please note that by “worked” I do mean traditionally publishing aesth…