hello, betts! i've read your works, listenes to your podcasts, and read a lot of your writing advice. to me, you're such a great teacher. and i wanted to ask of you have tips of on how to dissect what you're reading? like, how to read short stories like a writer. thank you so much and i hope you're doing well! <3
thank you for the kind words! and what a great question.
first, i have a resource that i think is very valuable for reading as a writer, which is The New Yorker Fiction podcast. (unlike the magazine itself, the podcast is not paywalled.)
the premise of the podcast is that a writer picks a story from the New Yorker archives and reads it. it's not their work, but work they admire. each episode has three parts:
the author is introduced by the new yorker fiction editor and they talk a little about why they chose the story (generally for some specific aspect of craft) which sets the listener up with something to be paying attention to or looking out for.
the author reads the story.
the fiction editor interviews the author about the story, which tends to take up about half the podcast. they tend to go *really* in-depth into craft.
i know the new yorker is generally synonymous with pretension, but what i find particularly compelling is that, in listening to writers fangirl (gn) about the work of other writers, it really chips away at that assumption of pretension, because even if you hate the story, even if you think it's trite or maybe just goes right over your head, you still get to listen to someone who loves it, and why they love it.
there are a ton of episodes, so here are 3 i really liked to start out with:
Edwidge Danticat Reads Zadie Smith
David Wright Faladé Reads Madeleine Thien
David Sedaris Reads George Saunders
if you find a story you really like, or love the way an author speaks about writing, you can then go to their website and find their other short stories and interviews.
now for a method you can try to improve your reading as a writer skills:
think of 1-3 things you want to improve in your own writing. let's say dialogue, imagery, and character.
whenever you read a story (or any fiction), note how those 3 things are working in the story separately. they'll probably fall somewhere on the spectrum of "wow, i never knew it could be done like that" to "that's the opposite of what i want for my own writing." many stories will fall in the middle, and there's nothing noteworthy that really clicks with you. that's fine.
but for everything on either side of that spectrum, you now have two questions to ask yourself: why do you love/hate it? and more importantly, what effect does it have on the impact of the story?
imitate that writer's approach as a prompt for yourself.
let's say you read a story where the dialogue is not in quotes. it's also not italicized. let's say you find that obnoxious. why might you find it obnoxious?
well, it's a style choice that affects clarity. sometimes it's hard to figure out who's saying what, or if something is even being said at all or if it's just part of the narration. that doesn't mean that particular style choice is bad, just that you don't like it. and that's okay.
now write a story (it can be very short, or you can even just play around with your existing WIP) where you write dialogue without quotations or italics, no punctuation at all to indicate something is being spoken aloud.
while you're writing, note the challenges you're having and what you enjoy about the approach (if anything).
you'll find with this particular exercise that you have two options: 1) make *very* clear dialogue tags (he said, she asked, etc.), or 2) summarize what's being said instead of writing the dialogue itself, which is called indirect discourse.
even if you hate what you come up with and vow always to use quotations for dialogue, simply doing the exercise will improve your ability to write dialogue, because now you're far more conscious of the way it's rendered on the page.
i hope you find this helpful! (brief plug: a great way to learn to read as a writer is by attending @fanauthorworkshop, where we're all practicing our reading-as-writer skills as we go. applications are open for the fall session!)
