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 aesthetic fiction—but also simply having a rich interior life.
Without some intrinsic commitment to the latter, I think the former prohibitively unlikely. The opposite, however, is not the case.
writes frequently and wonderfully about the lay benefits of reading great literature; I dare say these approaches could enrich the experience for anyone.If even success often feels like failure in publishing, even the failure to publish cannot diminish the delights of reading.
I. Reading for delight
For it does all start with delight. Delight being distinct from dopaminergic entertainment; a more active, expansive set of pleasures tied to beauty and truth that can include everything from ego-silencing immersion to more conscious intellectual relish to cathartic gestalt to the perverse glee of schadenfreude.
For me, irony, humor, and specifically leggerezza are often central to delight—but not always, and they certainly needn’t be. As a child, I took a fervent interest in my grandmother’s Book of Common Prayer—much to her misplaced satisfaction—exclusively on the basis of its exquisite, whisper-thin scritta paper.
Almost everything I read through to the end these days offers delight in one form or another. I have zero qualms about abandoning a book midway that’s devoid of it, and absent some third-party force (school, work), long-suffering persistence strikes me as a false moral fortitude perilously close to if not overlapping the medicinal treatment of literature.
On the other end of the spectrum, when various axes of delight begin to entwine and compound, I lock into new, higher levels of attention. With nonfiction, this often entails slowing way down, intermittent rereading, and annotation. With fiction, I’m just as if not more likely to speed up in thrall, already half-subconsciously thinking: I want to read this again.
I make this note more concretely when a book is so delightful that I deem it a potential mimetic model for my own work; when it delights me in some way or ways that I, too, want to delight others. In such cases, a book is worth the still greater attention of rereading for connection.
II. Reading for connection
By connection I mean the link between the creative mechanics of everything an author is doing—form, character, plot, theme, symbol, device, lexicon, &c.—and one’s personal experience of readerly delight.
Some people will probably say what I’m getting at here is synonymous with “craft,” but I don’t like that word for it. I fear “craft” puts too great a focus on the mechanics over the personal effects; that it tends toward establishing general rules of thumb over cultivating a deep understanding of how a specific work of art achieves what it achieves for you.
There is no shortcut to the latter—and you wouldn’t want one! Not all reading for delight is necessary connective, but all reading for connection should still be delightful. If a novel doesn’t delight you in some way or other, how could you explore the mechanics underlying its capacity to delight? Why would you even if you could?
(But I need to understand what editors are buying, even if I don’t dig something myself, I can hear the devil’s advocate saying. Not this intimately, you don’t. And before embarking on any such path, might I recommend an exceedingly delightful novel called Erasure?)
Tactically, having a searchable, digital version of the text can be helpful; I nearly always have a book I’m reading for connection in multiple formats, and my notes tend to run across them as well.
Reading for connection can focus in on just one or two aspects of a work, or more expansively tackle how an author is putting it all together. Either way, it is an exercise in problem solving—not at all dissimilar from a “process” analysis with unstructured textual “inputs” and intellectual-emotional “outputs.”
I regret to inform you that I got much better at reading for connection after working in management consulting. The (re)reading for connection I did explicitly for The Portrait of a Mirror—Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc.—I approached from a mindset as much inspired by client projects as my undergraduate work on Ulysses, which I’ll return to in a bit.
I love puzzles, and this aspect of reading for connection makes it inherently delightful to me. That said: one of the trickiest parts of this sort of reading can be maintaining the kind of analytical attention necessary to “solve” a great novel’s inner workings against the pull of its more immersive delights.
When I was recently rereading Jane Austen in service of Austen Math, for example, I went in with the intention to read specifically for character connection—to understand how Austen plays with dimensional status markers to achieve both archetypal (e.g. “near-perfect hero”) and utterly distinctive (e.g., Mr. Collins) effects. It was an immensely pleasurable mission—and yet, on several occasions, I still found myself lapsing into reading for sheer experiential delight!
This is yet another reason why reading for connection tends to work best as rereading, especially when you’re doing it for fiction. The most intensely beautiful, true novels—those you deem most worthy of becoming mimetic models for your own work—can resist connective analysis by way of their very appeal.
In my experience, the best way to overcome this is to reread for connection immediately after reading for delight, an approach I first learned from my undergraduate thesis advisor, the Modernist scholar Michael Levenson. As he more specifically put it back in the day: “if you want to read Ulysses once, you have to read it twice.” Which brings me to—
III. Literary process scholarship
Think of literary process scholarship as an extreme offshoot of reading for connection, going beyond the final text to piece together how the work’s mechanics and effects coevolved over the course of its creation.
I’ve previously shared how important studying the revisionary histories of Ulysses and The Waste Land was to my development as a novelist (and consultant), even though I didn’t realize it at the time. But I’ve said less about what this literary process scholarship entailed.
While I have no idea how many times I read The Waste Land—a lot—I read Ulysses seven times in three years. Twice in an undergraduate seminar, twice in a doctoral seminar, and three times independently while working on the thesis. The first read for each class, per pedagogical design, was for delight, with the second read for connection in conjunction with Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated.
My independent reads, meanwhile, took place alongside biographies, scholarly analyses, and early draft facsimiles. I admittedly spent more time on the facsimiles for The Waste Land than Ulysses—mainly because there is a well-organized annotated edition of the former tracking Eliot’s back and forth with Pound, whereas Joyce’s manuscripts are, if you’ll excuse my scholarly jargon, fucking insane:
Not that this wasn’t part of Ulysses’ appeal. The difficulty, the complexity, the problem-solving. “I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality,” Joyce quipped, famously.
If I’d properly understood this as the higher goal of my thesis while I was working on it, I would have spent still more time with the drafts than I did. But even a cursory look at this sort of stuff can be helpful—it gestures toward the amount of time and effort great literature requires, even of geniuses and even if pleasurable, in a way that computers and writing software tend to mask if not retrospectively elide.
Perhaps at some point I’ll walk through how chunks of my own novels evolved from first draft to published copy in the world of Scrivener and Word—tell me if this is of interest.
In the meantime, thanks for reading—I hope it brought some delight,
ANJ
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"With fiction, I’m just as if not more likely to speed up in thrall, already half-subconsciously thinking: I want to read this again."
Agree with all. In my most recent piece on Tender Is The Night, I wrote that double-reading a novel is as necessary as double-frying a french fry.
Natasha, I really appreciate the way you break this down—reading for delight, for connection, and for process, by which you mean studying drafts and revisions to see how a work took shape. In “How to Read and Why,” Harold Bloom put it simply: we read to know ourselves. What you’re sketching here shows how that self-knowledge becomes a writer’s tool too: delight as the spark, rereading as discovery, and even the puzzle-solving that shapes our own voices. No wonder that, one way or another, your own writing is delightful!