Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

Like Writing Down the Bones, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is one of the books where I look at the cover and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, but I have no memory of ever having read it. I can’t help but think that this was a book I used to stare at longingly on the shelf at the bookstore back before I had money to spend on these types of things. Or maybe it was assigned reading from one of my undergraduate writing classes.

No idea.

Anyway, Reading Like a Writer was the fourth most popular book about writing on Goodreads when I started this project in 2018. Here are some thoughts.

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Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is one of those writing books which seems very familiar to me in the sense that I feel like I’ve seen the cover somewhere before but I have no memory of whether or not I’ve actually read it.

In this case, I think I did try to read Writing Down the Bones at one point, maybe when I was a teenager. I imagine that the chapter titles like “Fighting Tofu” might have put me off at the time. I didn’t want weird philosophical stuff. I wanted to know how to write. I wanted to know the rules. But not, like, The Elements of Style-type rules. The rules of story writing. I needed to know if I was getting it right.

I’d like to say that as an adult I’m less concerned with “the rules.” The truth is, I still read writing advice primarily to discern if what I’m already doing is “right” rather than to learn something new. But I’m a little more open to Natalie Goldberg’s approach now than I probably would have been as a teenager.

Of course, I’m now also interested in the role of research in creative writing.

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