How old were you when you learned the facts of life? Not
those facts. The other ones. Beginning with this one. If you want to write, you
must learn how to read. Not the way other people read, but the way writers
read. Doctors in medical school study (read, if you will) about body systems,
organs, functions, dysfunctions, and treatments. The skeletal system, the
endocrine system, the spleen, the nerves, the digestive tract, and the uses of
antibiotics. They also, (this is very important) work with real cadavers
examining the actual materials of their profession and the mechanisms of how
things come together or fall apart. Call it an academic autopsy.
Autopsy, by the way, literally means seeing with one’s
own eyes. As a writer you should be reading fiction, nonfiction, poetry,
advertising, and horoscopes with an eye to autopsy. Play doctor on published
writers’ work. Unless it’s a library book or you borrowed it from your cousin,
you should be underlining phrases that surprise or delight or that have odd
syntax. You should be jotting question marks by bits that confuse or
contradict. Writing “ha!” or putting a smiley face where you find the piece
fun. “No!” where you disagree. “YES!” where the author put into words what
you’ve never been able to articulate. Strike through sentences or passages you
find unnecessary. I’ve been caught squeezing “WTF?” on a page when the action
or motive or assertion is so totally out there I wonder what the writer can
possibly have been thinking to have written it.
Read with a pen in your hand. Use it like a scalpel to
peel back the skin of a story and see the supporting structures. For example, Hemingway’s
“Hills Like White Elephants”* is a story told almost entirely in dialogue. Give
it a second reading and see if you can tell why. What effect does it give? What
emotional response does so much dialogue produce? Check it with X-ray goggles.
What is conspicuously not said? Again, why? Whose point of view is the short
story told from? Would it be a different story if Hemingway used a different
point of view to relate it?
If you hate a short story (maybe the one above) and you
do an autopsy on it, you’ll probably discover the specifics of why it doesn’t
work for you. Call it the COD. Cause of Death. You want as a writer to avoid
the elements that annoy you as a reader. Learn from the icky stuff. Find out
what gives a failed story that bad smell. Figure out how it might have been
saved if it had just been re-worked in time. Did the tense kill it? Too much
description? Flat characters? Unbelievable dialogue? Other folks may name it
their favorite, but if you feel like washing your hands after reading it, don’t
duplicate it. Don’t spread an epidemic of bad literature.
If you want to write books, write in your books. Enter
into a conversation with the text and it will open itself up to you. Take what a
close, forensic look offers you. Use it as you construct your own of body of
work.
