Reading as a Writer

I first started my journey reading as a writer when I was on my poetry apprenticeship. I began looking at how poets put a poem together, the images they used, the way motifs or images piled up in a poem, the way line breaks worked - or didn't - and how and why a certain poet was recognisable.

It took me a long time to take this slowed down reading to prose - partly because when I picked up a novel or a short story, I was immersed in the story - reading to discover what happened next.

Reading is one of the most important tools for better writing, however, and when I started to write novels, I began to read novels in the same way as I read poetry. Ahha! That's how that plot element is introduced! That's how the central character is first introduced. This dialogue has a subtext the characters aren't aware of, which enriches my reading experience and furthers the plot. Oh, and how beautiful this passage of descriptive writing is - but look, it's not just describing a setting, it's also adding to my understanding of a character. Sometimes these observations were more about the nuts and bolts of writing - why has this author chosen a multiple point-of-view over a limited point of view. Why have they written in the present tense. If I go through this piece and change it to past tense would I lose anything? Wow - there's an historical inaccuracy! And so on.

Textual analysis is often shunned by new writers - and new students. They 'did' it at school. It ruined the work for them. Writerly analysis will never ruin a work for you - it should, rather, enhance your reading experience and enlarge your writing knowledge. You need to be able to discover and analyse how an author puts together a piece of writing - what tools and techniques he or she is using.

This year - as with every year - I'm keeping a reading journal. In that journal I make notes about important aspects of the books I read - sometimes I'll include quotations from the book to illustrate what I've noted. Sometimes I'll list other books by the author that I'd like to read or interesting biographical notes. A reading journal my mother bought on sale recently also has a section that asks what the reader was doing when she or he was reading the book - I quite like that as re-reading an entry with that chronicled can bring back a specific time and place, so I'll be adding that to my reflections.

Most of all this year, I'll be reading slowly - I got an e-reader for Christmas and I'm in love with the ability to make annotations on it. Having grown up in a secondhand bookshop I hate the idea of writing on an actual book - and highlighting a text? Never! But the e-reader gives me this opportunity without actually wrecking any pages, which is wonderful. It also allows me to easily look up any unfamiliar words - and I want to improve my vocabulary this year. As you age, your vocabulary narrows unless you're quite attentive. In this field I can't afford this to happen so I'm going to be vigilant about learning and using new words.

I'm also going back to memorising poems - I did this in 2009 and part of the way into 2010 and it was a wonderful way of analysing poetry - I had to really think about the order of the words and lines of each poem. There were poems I had loved which I loved less after the experience of memorising them - reading a poem over and over again made me very aware of any weaknesses in it - but there were also poems that became talismanic. Poem-amulets to hold against hard times.

Finally this year I'm also learning French - I learnt French throughout school and into university but I've gone back to the very beginning. My daughter and I are studying it at the Alliance. Learning a different language makes you much more aware of grammatical rules, the sounds of words and the structure of language. So I'm sure this experience will also influence the way I read. When you read texts in a language you are learning, you must read slowly - so it's a good reminder to slow down in English as well. The other advantage is that you must often read aloud - to hear the words. I'm taking that back to English texts and reading some passages aloud - even if it's only to the dogs! I read all my own writing out loud - it's a wonderful way of hearing what I haven't got quite right. Reading other people's writing aloud will help further develop my critical ear.

Last night I finished Shane Maloney's Stiff - his first Murray Whelan book. Maloney's dialogue is spot on - the world of Labor politics, grass roots and power-mongering gives him a rich canvas of different voices and jargons and he exploits that beautifully. The plot is nicely convoluted and although you never quite believe that Whelan can be as stupid as he often is, Whelan's a sympathetic character, sceptically idealistic and dealing with his own problems throughout. Good holiday reading! And also useful for anyone who wants to delve into mystery writing - Maloney is so obviously at home in the world he's portraying that there's no faltering in his voice of authority.

Must go and write up my reading journal!