About

 Reading like a writer

If you read as a writer you want to understand how the writer constructed the thing you are reading. You don’t just want to understand what the writer is trying to say. You are not just waiting to be moved. You want to look inside the workings and find out what is going on. And you want to do this partly at least because you want to go home and do it yourself.

How do you put a narrative together? Even if you do not feel the need to recreate some sort of classic narrative arc, or perhaps especially if that is the case, you will have the suspicion that you still need something. These reviews are a quest for that something.

I had spent years reading books – and more books – and yet more books. There they all were, all lined up. We had to put up new bookshelves every few years. I had spent so many years reading books that it was no longer any use asking me whether I had read any particular book. The only pertinent question now was whether I could actually remember anything about it. And reading all those books was just like dropping stones into a well – they disappeared without trace.

After realising that a short story could easily take a few months to write it just seemed rather cavalier to read all those words without paying them due attention. So these reviews aim to do that too – to give all those stories the attention they deserve. And to help me work out how to tell my own stories.

Here goes.