To Write Better, Read Better

Learning what it means to read better.

Vivian Gornick cannot teach you how to write. Her working thesis, after many years as a creative writing professor at The New School, Harvard, Iowa, and more, is that the best she can do is help you read better.

Her reflection on this in The Situation and The Story didn’t come to my attention until after enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing (now hosted by Whitworth University). Filling out my application, I was skeptical that anyone could do anything to help me write the way I wanted. But the frustration of unsuccessful attempts to learn in isolation left me desperate enough to take the chance, committing the time (and tuition) required to enter this forge.

My application was accompanied by a portfolio. I wanted to scrawl across the cover letter: Just tell me what my problems are. If my character is too beige, my mind too pedestrian, or my soul too shadowed to generate interesting sentences, just say so. If all you can do is shake your venerated heads and shame me for neglecting Mrs. Brady’s lessons on diagramming sentences, so be it. Whatever. But please, no pussyfooting. Just tell me what I lack. (The faculty were nothing like I imagined they would be.)

Months later, I arrived on campus, braced for the knock-out punch condemning my bundle of inarguably off-target writing samples. This left me temporarily blind to the confident but understated and often casual pointers to reading better. In each lecture I listened through my demand, “Tell me how to write better.” So I had probably heard it a dozen times before I noticed the first half of this admonition: “To write better, read better.”

Reading and writing feel radically different to me. The phrase initially sounded like a quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi, a pithy irony more at home on the wall of Persian café than a truth I would cling to forevermore. I have since seen this observation so often in writing about writing, that it would seem trite if not for the fundamental importance warranting repetition. For many accomplished writers, reading is credited as both the fuel for continuing their solitary march and the ladder we climb toward improvement.

“Read better” seems plain enough. But in struggling to understand what it actually means, I realized our lecturers and visiting writers were using it with a few different meanings.

Some meant “read better writing”—spend time with better crafted prose, poetry, essays, and memoirs. Others meant something like “be a better reader”—which felt like having a running coach tell me to “run faster.” Others were encouraging us to “work harder” at our reading, and mercifully pointing the way. Today, I hear the phrase as a chord, three notes stacked to elicit harmonics none could sound alone.

1 - The exhortation to read better writing serves as the bass note, the foundation of the chord, and is perhaps the most obvious. Thankfully, they provided reading lists pointing me to exceptional work as well as personalized recommendations of specific authors and titles.

There may be people who can write better than anything they’ve ever read, but I’m not one of them. Time spent with well-crafted work expands my understanding of what is possible to accomplish by stringing words together.

I was quite surprised to learn it’s not essential to affirm, or even fully understand, what a writer is saying to learn from their technique. A few of the many works that overpowered me included Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and W. G. Sebald’s walkabout in Rings of Saturn. My understanding of these remains insufficient to properly evaluate their perspectives. Nonetheless, each contributed to my understanding of what writing can do. (My sincere thanks to Cameron, Scott, and Robert for helping me crack these open.)

2 - The highest note of this chord was encouragement to be a better reader. This stoked our aspirations with a magic trick performed repeatedly in the flagship lectures on Art & Faith. Each expository talk served as a variation of the same type of performance. Like a magician inviting an audience member to inspect a hat, rope, or sword, we received a reading assignment in advance. I would read the selected essays, poems, or books and notice all that I could. On the first day of the term, I took my seat in the classroom and watched a seemingly ordinary person take the stage with nothing up their sleeves. They would smile, open the book, and make it levitate. Then spin. Then turn into a phoenix and fly laps around the room.

With each new term I read with more analytic zeal, trying to see everything before they showed me. Yet every time, the miracle happened. In their hands, any given page could surrender a rabbit, become an umbrella that summoned a thunderstorm, or make me disappear. At least for a while.

These lectures revealed the expansive headroom above me; a cavernous space in which to grow. They pointed out levers and opened panels I hadn’t even seen to show us how the piece was arranged, why it worked, and how carefully crafted each element was. In this way, the path to a master’s degree steadily deepened my sense of how far I was from actual mastery.

3 - The middle note of this chord is my personal favorite. It’s the blue collar note emphasizing how we can work harder to become better readers. The labor is performed by investing time to read more attentively, think further, and reflect formally on a given piece. This is how they taught us to fish, to feed ourselves, to unpack what we found compelling in any writing. Here, we were given a tool to find the craft techniques we most needed to develop next. They called it “writing annotations.”

In the MFA glossary, an annotation is the short exploration of some aspect of craft made by analyzing a sample of remarkable writing. After one lecture, Alissa Wilkinson, described them this way: in an annotation, we’re not asking what a work is about, but rather, how the work is about that.

Like so many elegant tools, the annotation leverages a simple principle. This one serves to auto-personalize learning. There are an endless number of questions to explore in any page from a T. S. Eliot, Joan Didion, or Frederich Buechner. But the things that I, David, find intriguing are typically at the waterfront of my learning. If it grabs my interest, it is something I know enough to see, yet it remains new enough to be intriguing. Often, it is something I discovered for the first time while scrutinizing this very piece.

Snagging my attention provided an entry point for the annotation, but most of the learning occurred while writing. I would often start with one claim, then find my understanding incorrect or incomplete or oblivious to something much more interesting. This process revealed how much I was learning by writing out my analysis, teaching me more than gained from mental reflection alone.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, was in the pair of books first assigned. The day it arrived, I ripped open the shipping envelope and stood, turning pages above the packaging crumbs, slowly shaking my head. I could not understand what game he was playing or why. I began my annotation with an argument this was non-sensical, providing a litany of the ways in which he was breaking every rule of writing. Where is his thesis? His support? Why is he not defining terms? Where does he establish his own credibility? Does he expect anyone to understand him? I intended it as condemnation but it better served as confession. This was a list of all the ways Four Quartets was unlike anything I had read before. And it was in the process of making my case that my certainty faltered as I noticed a few bits I could make some sense of. These suggested potential reasons for his less-than-direct approach. A single bulb lit, marking the first step of my long-delayed journey into poetic expression.

A dozen annotations later, examining Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I set out to explain how cooly detached her authorial voice was. But as I gathered evidence, I noticed her narrator was also highly engaged. My annotation became an exploration of how she was doing both simultaneously. Another light came on.

One last example: a year later, reading Frederick Beuchner, I decided to reflect on how he made familiar things strange to help us see them better. But as I selected quotes to demonstrate this, I realized he wasn’t making them strange so much as making them intensely specific. He was obviously drawing on his own personal experience, but choosing moments that every reader is likely to have had. Is this making the familiar strange, or is it reviving a cliché by downshifting into sense perception so we can discover it once again? More lights had come on.

In each annotation the insight I gained was precisely what I was ready for. It lay adjacent to what I knew, offering a single additional step, in one direction or another, to enlarge my map of literary terrain.

Compared to new creative work, annotations are casual. More of a sketch than an attempt at art. More analysis than expression. They could be (almost) as casual as an email to my mentor about a book I read. But I quickly learned that there were real rewards for whatever time I invested in digging, testing my understanding, and rewriting to more accurately describe how the piece was working.

This chord is now as much a part of my practice as tempo, pace, and long runs are when training for a marathon. I hunt for better work to read, interrogate the mechanics, and, when it’s truly remarkable, invest time in writing out my understanding of how the author is accomplishing this miraculous thing called “good writing.” Working together, these strategies accomplish considerably more than one would in isolation.

To say more would be to fly even further into abstraction or metaphor, so instead, I’ll offer an example. Just a couple pages from me, appreciating a couple pages from one of the most distinctive, and delightful voices I encountered in the program: Brian Doyle.

Photo by Jonathan Singer on Unsplash