Make a habit of it: Stephen King’s “On Writing”

I started this blog post at around 8 p.m. on a Wednesday. I try to write at the same time every weeknight, currently for about 30 minutes to an hour. It doesn’t always happen, but I try to make a habit of it.

If there is anybody who knows about making a habit of writing, it’s Stephen King. “I like to get ten pages a day,” he writes in “On Writing,” “which amounts to 2,000 words.” He also tries to write every day. By establishing this writing habit early on, King’s become one of the most prolific living writers on the planet.

Ten pages a day seems like a hefty amount, intimidating, really, especially if you were a writer just starting out. But, the king of horror goes on to say that 1,000 words a day, or about five pages, is an achievable goal for new writers—and you can even take a day off. I’ve tried reaching that five-pages-a-day-goal, probably after reading “On Writing” for the first time. It’s tough. Blank pages, blank Word documents are intimidating. Trying to sit still long enough to do it when you have the blank screen and no words coming is intimidating.

Of course, what’s intimidating you is fear. “Fear,” writes Richard Rhodes in another favorite book on writing “How To Write,” “stops more people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do?”

Similar questions or harsher ones probably cross your mind when you sit down to write, although Rhodes offers a good way to break the wall of writer’s block: “When fear is upon you, write for yourself. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you do it regularly [habit, again]. Set aside an hour or a half-hour daily or as often as you can . . . .Forget spelling . . . . Forget punctuation if paying attention to it inhibits you—you can always add it later. . . . Don’t think about how you’re writing: write.”

It doesn’t really matter—especially at first—what you write, you just have to write, Rhodes notes, even if you’re just writing about a process.

I’ve spent a good part of my writing life trying to develop a consistent writing habit. One of the more difficult aspects of establishing a writing habit is working it around a full-time job, especially when that job involves writing. Working for newspapers made it even more difficult, given the erratic schedules I’ve followed. Shifting your mind from nonfiction to fiction can be difficult too, but I was able to do it.

Establishing a writing habit has many purposes. If you’re writing fiction, when you write regularly, it keeps you in the world you are creating. “Once I start work on a project,” King writes, “I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to ‘feel’ like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.”

I think this can be said for nonfiction as well. An article or essay can grow stale, you can lose the narrative and the connection of one thought to the other. Even writing daily, you can get lost and essay too far from the original path.

Establishing a habit helps you tap into the flow of your imagination, into the unconscious mind without needing to wait for the Muse to whisper in your ear. The Muse, as King notes, is “a hard-headed guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. . . .Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making magic.”

But, you can also hurt yourself psychically if you’re too rigid about sticking to your habit. As Roy Peter Clark notes in his chapter about “On Writing” in “Murder Your Darlings,” a writing habit can be self-defeating, especially if you’ve set up some staggeringly impossible rate of productivity. “You do not have to exercise every day to gain maximum health benefit,” Clark writes. “In the same spirit, do not be discouraged by violating your self-imposed writing schedule.”

Clark’s right about this. You overwork yourself lifting weights, say, and you strain or tear a muscle, you’re not getting any benefit from the exercise. You keep working out, trying to work past the pain, and not heal, you hurt yourself worse. No pain, no gain is bullshit. No writing every day, no success is bullshit too. When you beat yourself up for not writing every day, or not getting in 2,000 words a day, you’re reacting to another form of fear, the authoritarian and demanding ego telling you, “You can’t really be a writer if you don’t write every day.” Listening to that voice can be as debilitating as not writing at all and never producing anything.

Still, at the same time, to be a writer, you must write. When you establish a writing habit, you’re working past fear, and becoming productive. You’re producing words, sentences, paragraphs, pages. Pages become articles, stories, and books. A page a day is a book a year, as Rhodes notes. If your intention is to become a professional writer, you have to produce, and then submit what you write. And that’s another fear you have to overcome—the fear of submitting what you write, the fear of being rejected, or maybe even the fear of being accepted.

I’ve set up my own walls when it comes to developing a career as a professional writer. Oh, I could establish a writing habit. Often, even with a full-time job, I could make time to write, but mostly what I would write—as far as fiction goes—were writing exercises from writing books. Not to say I didn’t learn anything. I did.

As an aside: No matter what kind of writing you do, if you want to challenge yourself, do the exercises in John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction.”

So, I wrote those exercises. I incorporated them in my writer’s toolbox. When I got my first newspaper job, I wove some of those skills I learned into my journalism. Using these tools certainly made me a better feature writer.

The thing is, I aspired to write fiction, and I was writing fiction when I wrote those exercises. I just wasn’t finishing anything. I wasn’t putting all those techniques together into a finished project. Or it took me months just to write a short story when I finally put it all together. I would revise and polish and polish and revise the same story. I might submit it once or twice to the big prominent magazines and journals like The New Yorker or The Paris Review, and once the story was rejected, I’d set it aside, and find a new book with more exercises.

Doing the exercises was a way to tell myself that I was dedicated to the art and craft of writing without really being productive. I was also learning—sometimes from the writing books—to disdain the notion of being a “professional writer,” while at the same time I craved being published. I craved a literary life, one in which I wasn’t really producing a whole lot of literature.

When I first read “On Writing,” I didn’t pay too much attention to King’s section on developing a career as a writer. I wish I had paid more attention to it. King’s composite writer, “Frank,” as his success grows, as he begins to publish more, he begins to think in terms of publishing as a business. He begins to see himself and presents himself as a professional writer. He takes as much care crafting letters to agents and publishers as he does crafting his stories. Those letters are like a resume, the first thing a potential employer usually sees of you.

Of course, in the 20 years since “On Writing” was published, publishing has changed drastically, especially as indie publishing has gained more and more respect. Still, King’s advice has value. You have to keep producing. You have to submit. You have to act as if you are a professional, whether you take a traditional route, an indie route, or become a hybrid.

And, writing is about more than publishing and producing and making lots of money. Writing is always about writing. “I have written,” King writes, “because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.”

Writing’s something I hope to do forever because it gives me joy. I make a habit of it because I can travel through my imagination. I make a habit of it because it helps me think and is meaningful. Of course, making a great deal of dough from it wouldn’t hurt too much either.

Fear is mind-killer in crime fiction

I’m a latecomer to mysteries and crime fiction. Until about five or six years ago, I had little interest in the genre, unless you count spy novels like John le Carre’s “The Russia House” or “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” or even a few of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Occasionally in my reading life over the years I’d pick up a book like William Hjortsberg’s “Nevermore” based on a friend’s recommendation, and of course there’s the obligatory high school reading of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and several of Poe’s short stories. I would probably count a science-fiction novel like China Mieville’s “The City & The City” as a mystery too.

My interest in crime fiction developed, when late in my journalism career, I began writing about crime. Writing about crime in real life spawned an interest in writing mysteries, and the writer in me said, “If you’re going to try to write mysteries, you might want to read mysteries.” That led me to a whole lot of catch-up reading, which, in turn, led me becoming a fan, and wondering why I had ever neglected the genre in the first place.

I have my suspicions, of course, but I won’t get into them too deeply here. Some of the neglect has to do with the literary snobbishness I developed as a graduate-level English major in the 90s, snobbery that robbed me of crime fiction well into my forties. It’s the same sort of snobbery that made me turn my back on fantasy and science fiction, though crime fiction seems to have a little more clout among the literati—the why of that is another question worth investigating some other time.

Anyhow, in my catch-up period, one of the writers I had long wanted to read was Georges Simenon, the Belgian creator of Inspector Jules Maigret. I first read about Simenon, a prodigious drinker, in Donald Goodwin’s “Alcohol and the Writer”. Before I read any fiction by Simenon, my next encounter with him, if I’m recalling right, was in a reprint of his Paris Review interview, where I became even more intrigued by the author himself, and especially his output. When he was ready to write a novel, he’d block out two weeks on his calendar to write and revise it. He wrote hundreds of novels—75 of which were in the Maigret series— and novellas, as well as scores of stories and articles. Many of the Maigret novels are under 200 pages. “The Yellow Dog,” the first and so far only novel of his that I’ve read, is 134 pages in a Penguin translation published in 2013. It also has 11 chapters, so a chapter a day and three days to revise.

First published in French in 1931, “The Yellow Dog” is the fifth in the Maigret series. I mistakenly thought it was the first, misreading the About the Author blurb, which says the novel was the “first Maigret novel to be adapted for the big screen.” (See, easy mistake, when you’re rapidly flipping through pages in the local Barnes & Noble trying to find the first book of a series). The novel’s set in Concarneau, a small port town in northwestern France, and Maigret is sent there when the city’s biggest wine dealer Monsieur Mostaguen is shot and wounded by an unknown assailant. After Maigret arrives more crimes ensue: a retired newspaperman Jean Servieres disappears after his blood-stained car is found near a river, and a customs agent gets shot in the leg. Each of the crimes seems to be haunted by a strange yellow dog and rumors of a giant vagrant lurking about.

Fears mount in the small town as Maigret investigates these crimes. The town’s fears become so elevated that usually busy streets become deserted and “deathly silent” by four o’clock when the street lamps are turned on (it’s early November). “It was as if the strollers had passed the word. In less than a quarter of an hour the streets had emptied, and when footsteps sounded, they were hurried ones of someone anxious to get to the shelter of home.” People get so tense that someone shoots the yellow stray, which howls in the street where it’s shot like “some supernatural creature.” (I wonder if this is a nod to “The Hound of the Baskervilles”.)

Clearly, fear is the novel’s dominant theme. The word itself appears throughout the text. “FEAR REIGNS IN CONCARNEAU,” a newspaper headline reads, in a Chapter with the same title. As Maigret wraps up the investigation and is about to make the big reveal, he says, “‘I’d like to talk to you a little more about fear, because that’s what underlies this whole business.'” This in a Chapter titled “Fear.” Simenon expertly chooses the right words to evoke fear as well. In one scene, a telephone “jangled,” as if its nerves were shot.

Simenon also plays with supernatural elements to add to the chilling atmosphere. By the way, it’s almost always cold. The wounded dog has a supernatural howl, a doctor appears as pale as a ghost. These kinds of details, along with references to fear and death appear throughout the novel. It’s the kind of detail writers should pay attention to. Repetition of images and words are always clues to what a writer is thinking, as Roy Peter Clark notes in “The Art of X-Ray Reading”. Use your words carefully, build your images.

But it’s the atmosphere of fear that Simenon evokes that’s the most intriguing. Here is a small town where everybody knows everybody, and it’s suddenly disrupted by a crime, which seems to be an attempt at murder. The longer the crime goes unsolved, the greater the fear, the more pressure Maigret is put under to solve the crime. That’s how crime works in real life too. It acts on our fears, whether we’re victims or not. Of course, Maigret is a competent investigator, trained to work past all the noise and pressure to actually get the crime solved.

Fear is the mind-killer—to borrow from science-fiction’s “Dune”— in crime fiction and in life. Fear is a product of ignorance. In a mystery, fear is generated by not knowing who the killer is and the characters in the novel wondering “Will I be next?” It’s the question asked by the press in “The Yellow Dog”—“Whose turn next?” is a subhead in a newspaper article. In fiction and real life, we are always ignorant of the unknown. That’s why we fear it. We don’t have the ability of precognition like the precogs in Philip K. Dick’s story “Minority Report,” on which the 2002 Tom Cruise movie was loosely based. We can’t catch criminals before they commit crimes. We can’t know if the guy in the trenchcoat at the movie theater is just cold on a January night, or if he’s about to whirl around and start blasting with a shotgun. We can’t know—if we’re black—whether the next cop that pulls you over is going to give you a ticket or shoot you. It’s that fear of the unknown that leaders manipulate and use to arouse suspicion and distrust toward protesters. Whose store gets looted next? Whose store gets burned down? We need law and order and tear gas, lots of tear gas, and bludgeoning people. That’ll stop the fears. Meanwhile, a block away, a kid enjoys an ice cream cone. Of course, there are things to be afraid of, and fear is useful. Sometimes, for instance, when the wolves are at your heels, you need to heed the flight instinct and run. Simenon and other crime writers, when they’re really good, capture our fears at all levels.

Whose turn next? Nobody knows. Nobody can know. And fear will always be the mind-killer if we let it.

Some Ramblings on Writing, Writing Books, and Science Fiction

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to and reading Roy Peter Clark’s Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser. As you might’ve gathered from the subtitle, it’s a book about writing books. Clark gives us both a glimpse into some of the better writing books available, and draws out some of the main lessons learned about writing.

Clark, senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute, has written some good books on writing himself like Writing Tools and The Art of X-Ray Reading, both of which I’d recommend. And while I’ve just started Murder Your Darlings, I’ll have to recommend it, too.

Among the writing books Clark includes is Ursula K. LeGuin’s excellent Steering the Craft. What surprised me, though, is that Clark confesses, “Ursula K. LeGuin may be the most famous American writer that I had never heard of.” But, apparently he had never heard of her—or read her— until he started seeing tributes to her after her death in 2018. It was shortly after reading tributes that he ran across Steering the Craft.

Reading that, I wondered how Clark managed to miss reading LeGuin. At the very least, I thought he would have encountered The Left Hand of Darkness or even The Lathe of Heaven. I then wondered if Clark missed reading LeGuin because her primary genres were science fiction and fantasy. While Clark mentions Tolkien and Harry Potter in X-Ray Reading, I get the impression he might not hold science fiction or fantasy in as high regard as other forms of literature. I have no proof of this, of course, and I still hold Clark in high regard as a writer and writing teacher.

And, actually, on one hand, I get the bias against science fiction. If you’ve sat in any English courses, say, over the last 50 years, you’re unlikely to have been assigned any science fiction, or not very much. Tolkien gets a nod, sometimes. Maybe Orwell or Huxley or Bradbury. I took a short story class in which we read one of Asimov’s robot stories, “Bicentennial Man.” There’s not much exposure. The books in Clark’s X-Ray Reading are, for the most part, literary classics like The Great Gatsby and Madame Bovary—though fantasy might get a nod with works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Odyssey. All worthwhile reads, and worth learning from. But no science fiction. No Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or LeGuin.

Even now, as sci-fi/SF culture has pushed deeper into mainstream culture with Star Wars, Game of Thrones and video gaming, among others, biases against the genre still appear . I get that tastes vary, and yes, there’s plenty of hokiness even in the very best science fiction and fantasy that can be a turn-off. In the U.S., at least, we have a deeply ingrained suspicion of imagination and intellect—science in particular. So, there’s that.

Genre fiction, in general, other than crime fiction, still seems to get pushed to the literary suburbs. I’m reading Walter Mosley’s Blue Light—I would argue it’s horror rather than SF—and a blurb from USA Today on the back cover reads, “A mind-bending trip into the brave new world . . . good writing, regardless of genre.” The implication—horror/SF is poorly written, juvenile perhaps, and not to be taken seriously by any serious-minded person. Unless it’s well-written?

As a reader and writer—one who makes attempts at writing SF—I find myself sometimes getting stalled when reading science fiction and fantasy. Some of the masters of the genre like Asimov or Philip K. Dick are not great stylists by any means, but then again neither are Theodore Dreiser or Henry James (two writers I have trouble pushing through no matter how hard I try.)

I recently reread Asimov’s I, Robot, and had a hard time pushing through these fascinating stories. Asimov’s style is well recognized for being minimalist, at best. “Asimov preferred a completely unembellished style of writing,” according to the website Develop Good Habits. “His characters were so simple and the dialogue so functional that it approached the telegraphic minimum of language.” While I tend to prefer a simple style (this from someone who wrote his master’s thesis on William Faulkner, simplicity to the point of transparency can often make fiction dry and uninteresting.

While Asimov’s style is dusty, what makes reading him difficult for me is the tone. It’s the tone of mid century middle school lit. “Gloria withdrew her chubby little forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and blinking in the sunlight.” This sentence comes from the opening paragraph of the story, “Robbie,” about a young girl who becomes emotionally attached to her robot. On one hand, the tone is appropriate for the character, and little different from James Joyce’s opening lines in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road . . .” This is a young Stephen Dedalus being told a children’s story. The tone swiftly moves to a more adult tone. “Robbie’s” tone stays the same, even when the point of view switches to the adults in the story.

And yet, and yet, trudge through the dusty, rarely varying prose, tolerate the tone, and you have one a great story about human relationships to machines and themselves. All of I, Robot‘s stories are certainly relevant today as we begin to deal with A.I., and our relationships to our robots, and other devices like smartphones. This is the power of science fiction. It’s the power of any literary genre. It shows us, us, as cliched as that is. One of my favorite robot stories is “Reason,” about a robot that develops a religious impulse. It’s a perfect critique of religion, especially fundamentalism, but also a critique of pure reason—the robot’s religion is driven by logic, and reasoned out through a priori deductions, all purely theoretical, but accepted as truth, even when experience and evidence contradict it. It would be a great story to teach about critical thinking, a great story for an introductory philosophy class.

If I hadn’t pushed through Asimov, and had dismissed his writing as just banal genre writing, I would have missed these wonderful stories with challenging ideas. So, give SF a chance. Don’t dismiss it, or its fandom.

—Todd

On Writing: Is Writing Hard?

Susan Orlean, journalist and author of The Orchid Thief, once tweeted, “Writing is hard. Writing is hard. Writing is hard.”

I retweeted her. I felt a surge of empathy. Though I’m nowhere near the talent or accomplishment of Susan Orlean — she’s a goddess of great feature writing — as a writer I understood exactly what she felt.

Reading that tweet was also quietly reassuring: someone of her talent experienced difficulties with her writing. Probably at the time I saw the tweet, I was having difficulties with my own writing. Maybe I was trying to put together a marketing document, and trying to make sense of business jargon. Or maybe I was slamming a news story together on deadline. Or maybe I was trying to get imaginary people to come alive on the page in an imaginary world my brain had concocted. Or maybe I was just trying to compose a blog post, like I am now.

Whatever the circumstance — the writing situation, I suppose it’s called — I’m sure I got up from my chair (as I just did) at least 20 times after maybe, maybe writing a sentence. I might have paced halfway across my bedroom with a cup of lukewarm coffee in hand to gather my thoughts and come back to my chair and pecked out a few more words or even a phrase — possibly a complete sentence.

I know for sure that as I was composing this post, I topped off said coffee at least three times. That was much easier than keeping butt to chair and typing. I also consulted my AP Stylebook to see whether or not to capitalize “tweet” when referring to that thing you do on Twitter. You don’t, by the way, capitalize “tweet,” according to the AP Stylebook.

Why have I procrastinated like this? Because, well, writing is hard.

Or is it?

Within 30-45 minutes or so, I’ve written six short paragraphs. I didn’t suffer, I didn’t bleed. About the worst thing that happened was developing coffee breath, and since it’s just me and the cat at home, there’s nobody to offend with it.

But, there is a mythology that surrounds writing — that it takes blood, sweat and possibly tears with an unleashing of fears to do it. And, if you’re not suffering, you’re somehow doing it wrong. And, people, including professional writers, believe the myth.

In Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark notes how common and pervasive the mythology has become.

“Americans do not write for many reasons,” he writes. “One big reason is the writer’s struggle. Too many writers talk and act as if writing were slow torture, a form of procreation without arousal and romance — all dilation and contraction, grunting and pushing.”

Building up that myth are writers themselves, as Clark notes, citing an oft-misattributed — usually to Hemingway (talk about the notion of suffering) — quote from New York sports writer Red Smith, “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”

The struggle, Clark says “is overrated, a con game, a cognitive distortion, a self-fulfilling prophecy, the best excuse for not writing.”

In my marginal notes next to this sentence, I wrote, “I need to remember this. I think it’s all a matter of confidence.”

And, I think that’s what the real struggle is, it’s with fear, as Richard Rhodes says in his book How to Write, “Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do?”

Fear is the real struggle. It’s what holds me back. Those questions above nag me when I write, no matter the size of the project — a blog post, a feature article, a novel draft. Fear says, “No one is interested.” Fear says, “Have another cup of coffee. Eat a bowl of ice cream.” Fear says, “Why bother to write tonight? You’re tired from your day job. You need to rest. That next episode of ‘Bosch’ looks pretty good. Nobody will care. You won’t make a living at this.”

Fear talks me out of writing. Some days I’d rather do algebra, writing seems so hard. I’ll bet fear talks you out of it, too. I would bet Susan Orlean had some sort of nagging fear when she tweeted “Writing is hard”.

So, no, writing isn’t hard, though it does require hard work and perseverance to master the craft. Fear makes it hard. Fear is a variable in an equation that makes anything a zero sum game.

But, you have a right to write, as do I, Rhodes notes. Why?

“You’re a human being,” he writes, “with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.”

—Todd

On Writing: Among the mysteries of writing is moving from abstract to concrete

We live among mysteries. One is the mystery of change. The other is the mystery of identity. Both are realities, but inseparable realities. Rivers constantly change and are never quite the same. The water in them is ever flowing and changing. The river banks and their courses are constantly shifting under the impact of floods and droughts. These are observable and undeniable facts. But in another sense — despite these changes — rivers have an enduring and unmistakable identity. The Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Ganges have existed for millennia, in much the same course and place, distinctly recognizable despite constant changes.

“What a marvelous piece of writing,” I wrote in my journal back in April when I first read this passage in I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. It’s the kind of writing that needs to be copied word for word in a journal. So I did. It’s a passage worth reading aloud to catch its rhythms and absorb its richness. So I did.

For those of you who have read this book, you know Stone is reflecting on Heraclitus’ observation that you never step into the same river twice. “Change, perpetual and inescapable, was his central theme,” Stone writes of the pre-Socratic philosopher.  (If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it; go buy it at a used bookstore, check it out from a library or order it from Amazon, and read it. You’ll be glad you did.) In this passage, Stone is in the process of critiquing Socrates’ insistence on needing to get to an absolute and unchangeable definition of a subject, a quest that borders on the impossible.

I want to note just a few things that make this passage stand out as a piece of writing worth studying. Stone sets a great pace with sentence variation.  He punches us in the beginning with some quick, short jabs to get us into the paragraph. Then his sentences lengthen, interestingly, as he mentions not life’s mysteries, but rivers. And like rivers, the sentences flow, they get broken up — in this case with a parenthetical statement surrounded by em-dashes — then flow together to mark the paradox of rivers, changeable unchangeableness. A mystery, like a river itself.

Moreover, and this is what stood out to me on the first reading, Stone takes a philosophical observation and examines its complexities, not using dry abstract academic jargon, but through an extended metaphor in plain, concrete language.

Stone, as Roy Peter Clark might put it, climbs up and down the ladder of abstraction. In this case, he flows from the mystery of change to rivers to the Amazon, the Mississippi, and the Ganges, all to show that change is constant, yet some things like identity, the “thisness” of a thing can at the same time, endure.

The abstractions, as Clark notes in his Writing Tools, can provoke thinking. The concrete, however, gives us the evidence for the ideas the abstractions provoked. It can work the other way as well, the images can lead us to the idea.

However you work it, this movement, this flow is a great tool for you as a writer. It’s worth trying, if only to lead yourself deeper into the mysteries of life to get a grasp of them before they wash down stream, forever lost.

—Todd

X-ray Reading: See Yourself Through to Good Writing

When I read Roy Peter Clark’s The Art of X-ray Reading, I felt like a time-traveler whisked back to the 1990s and my graduate lit classes.

Heady days those were in which little cliques of long-haired twentysomethings gathered in musty classrooms, sat in hard-backed wood desks and talked about books, or texts, as some of the literary theorists we studied called them. We parsed out Faulkner to digest the South’s racism. We dug deep into Lawrence and Woolf to understand gender inequalities.

In X-Ray Reading Clark, too, digs deep into literary classics like The Great Gatsby and Lolita. His purpose isn’t to parse out racism or gender inequality or discover some theory hidden in the words, sentences and paragraphs of classic texts. His purpose is to show—not tell—us where writers “learn their best moves.”

Note the word “where.” Instead of “where,” most books on writing and rhetoric concentrate on the “how” of writing. Thousands of such books line bookstore shelves. Of the making of writing books, there seems no end. You can reach for Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language;” or you can reach way back to ancient Greece, to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in part an answer to Plato’s disparaging of the art of public speaking — or writing for that matter — in works like Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Of course, you can open up Plato’s dialogues and see how his spokesman — old barefoot gadfly Socrates — ironically uses elements of rhetoric to dismember rhetoric. You can see, for instance, how Socrates does it: he gins-up plenty of examples (examples, as you well know, make for good evidence in supporting your arguments) he begs for absolute definitions. In turn, too, you can see Socrates placing great value on good writing when he tells his friend Callicles in Phaedrus, “Anyone may see there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing. The disgrace comes when a man writes not well, but badly.”

Even Clark’s recent Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer is a how-to — one worth plucking from bookshelves to add to your writer’s toolkit. Clark’s no stranger to writing. A journalist and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Clark’s written five books on writing and reading, including The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English and How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.

Whichever writing book you reach for, undoubtedly you’ll gather gems of great value like “Show, don’t tell,” or “Use the active voice.” But, where did the writers who dug up such shiny treasures learn them?

Reading, of course.

Not just any sort of reading, as Clark says.

They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in their reading, they see something more. It’s as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books.

This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us. Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page — effects such as clarity, suspense, humor, epiphany, and pain. These working parts are then stored in the writer’s toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box — rhetoric.

This kind of textual analysis is not new. In academia, it’s known as the New Criticism, its foundation close reading. Proponents of this critical style, like Cleanth Brooks, argued that only the text mattered. You understood a poem or work of prose only by peeling back every layer of the text, analyzing every word, letter, phrase, with no outside influence like historical context or god forbid the writer’s claimed intention (the intentional fallacy) to corrupt your analysis.

Francine Prose’s book from 2006 Reading Like a Writer is a fine example of this kind of reading, and like Clark, she shows how writers study writing peering closely at words and sentences, paragraphs and narration, character and dialogue, and details and gesture. Her book is primarily aimed at fiction writers.

Clark’s X-ray Reading delves into fiction, poetry and nonfiction, assessing the structure of Gatsby, the play of words on the tongue of Nabokov’s Lolita (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” It’s hard not hear that except in James Mason’s exquisite voice.), the meaning of the stopped clock in John Hershey’s classic nonfiction book on the dropping of the atomic bombs Hiroshima and breaking down the “cinematic slow-motion effect” of the opening passages of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. It’s nice to see nonfiction included, if only to see that nonfiction’s prose doesn’t have to cross the pedestrian cross walk of AP style or go over the lip of the black holes (is that drill down into?)  of academ-ese or business-ese and vanish in banality.

Clark also analyzes works of writers such as Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Joyce.

But, don’t worry if this all sounds like a boring literature class. Clark’s approach, as Tampa Bay Times reviewer Gregory McNamee notes, is “much more nuts and bolts than all that, and it seems just right: A beginning medical student learns anatomy through dissection down to the capillary level, and a beginning writer learns to conjure phrases such as Fitzgerald’s ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ by understanding from the ground up how sound and meaning combine.”

It’s a refreshing approach for a book on writing and reading. And, if anything, reading this book proves a great guide to reading in a way that makes books even more alive than usual. Which seems is a secondary purpose of Clark’s:

“One purpose of this book is to nudge you into reading some of the best literature ever written…Read. Enjoy. X-Ray. Write.”

—Todd