Learning to Read like a Writer
notes on Severence by Ling Ma
Writers read a lot. Stephen King reads 70-80 books a year. He reads for pleasure and reads widely. His list of reads he enjoyed, which he expanded for the 2009 edition of On Writing, features a wide range of novels. From Oliver Twist to the Jack Reacher novels from W. Somerset Maugham to Mark Z. Danielewski and Junot Diaz. There doesn’t seem to be anything he isn’t interested in reading, and there’s a reason for that.
Every book has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
I read On Writing in November 2018 and have tried since then to read more, and to read with intent. That has meant reading books about Taiwanese history, humor memoirs, experimental fiction, and local authors. While the number of books one reads says nothing about the quality of one’s reading, if you want to even begin to absorb the breadth of talent and styles in writing, you’re going to have to read a lot. For me, that’s around 80 books a year these days, according to my reading journal.
Plowing through all those words isn’t enough to learn how to write. Reading like a writer is a skill. Francine Prose wrote a book about it, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. She writes that “Part of a reader’s job is to find out why certain writers endure.” That means not just reading to see what I like, but to figure out what works for writers over and over again.
My process of reading and capturing thoughts is always in process and I continue to search for guidance from the greats. I recently listened to Tim Ferriss’s interview with Marginalian blogger and author Maria Popova where they both discuss creating indexes to ideas they mark in a book, which I love. Ryan Holiday’s notecard system makes my stationary loving soul sing - although I’ve found it’s difficult for me to keep up with writing everything out. And if you want to go full notecard, there’s also always the Zettelkasten method.
My books have become progressively more marked up over the years and I am better at making notes, in the sense that the notes I return to in books that I read a couple of years ago are more valuable to me than the random underlinings I made in a book finished a decade ago.
Lately, I’ve started listening to the podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing and soaking up the way they talk about how they read. It’s like Car Talk for writers. What’s landing best with me is the idea that there are devices one must use. They give them cute names like breadcrumbs and the naming of the things helps me find them.
Yesterday, I finished reading Severence by Ling Ma. I’ve got it as an ebook, which is an emotional challenge for someone who loves physical books. But I found that without the restraints of margins and my handwriting, my notes were more expansive. Unusually, a lot of my notes were about narrative tools, noticing the things the author did in her writing to make the narrative work for me, the reader.
For example, I marked these two sentences:
The shark fin dinner party took place on a cold, rainy Saturday night in late August. It marked the end of that strange transitory summer, and the beginning of something else.
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 45). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
They are the beginning of a section in chapter 3. My note says, “She is letting us know that change is coming. We won’t know what kind of change it is unless we read on.” Why does this matter? Because it’s basically the author teasing the reader. It’s letting you know, “listen, you want to read this description of a dinner party because something exciting is about to happen.” It’s subtly done but it encourages us to keep reading.
Later, she describes a scene in which Candace, our first-person protagonist, is lying in a tent listening to people talk around the campfire. They talk about the group’s destination, the Facility, and through their dialogue you learn about their doubts but also their personalities. One character is reprimanded for trying to “stir things up,” so we know they’re a trouble maker. They talk about places they’d like to live and they talk about Candace. The conversation is interspersed with Candace’s thoughts on these people she’s just getting to know.
Writing about the her relationship falling apart, she shares a snippet of the conversation;
Listen to me, Jonathan had said. Look at me. I have something to tell you.
I had stopped seeing him after that night. I stopped talking to him, stopped taking his calls or responding to his texts.
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 151). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
We don’t ever hear what he said, but only the fall out. This makes sense for a close first person narrative, but also offers an opportunity for writers who think we have to include all the details. Sometimes, the response on its own can be more expressive or evocative than an entire conversation.
Overall, I enjoyed Severence. It’s remarkable for the way it predicted some of the the things that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic (can you believe I wrote that in the past tense? that that period is over?) and it also gave me The Road and Stations Eleven post-apocalyptic vibes. I was intrigued by choices like the lack of quotation marks for the speakers and the way the narrative bounced back and forth in time. And then there was the almost throw away fact that our narrator was Chinese American. Just a hint of complication that didn’t lead the story, but kept popping up, especially in the past time lines.
Learning to read like a writer isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding.