One of the best teachers...

Insightful, useful, and entertaining. One of the best 'how to write' guides I have read. Beyond technical advice, Clark prompts me to revisit great works. Thank you. ( )

"To be a good x-ray reader, you must learn to overread, or overinterpret, a text." (ebook p. 163)

This book is about learning to read between the lines and to discern the deeper meaning meant by authors of classic writings, which I have NEVER been able to do. This author read The Great Gatsby six times to uncover what he believes the author meant by words, phrases, sentences, punctuations, and even names. I could read any classic or any poetry over a hundred times and never understand the deep meaning of it. I am a very literal reader. I'm that way with history books as well, and I usually have to keep Google handy for looking up the meaning of words. If you are into this kind of reading, and are becoming an aspiring writer, then you will most likely enjoy and understand this book, giving it a 5-star.

But, me? After reading this book, I now know there are just too many things to think about when forming a story, a paragraph and sentence structure. I will never be able to read a story and get into it if I’m dissecting sentences and paragraphs and trying to figure out why it works or doesn’t work, much less write a story and taking into account all the facets of writing well-structured and powerful sentences from beginning to end.

There are a few books on his personal recommended reading list, which I have read:
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin (1-star)
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2-stars because at least I understood what I was reading)
3. Hiroshima by John Hersey (4-stars)
4. Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (3 - stars)
It boils down to personal preference. Classics are just not my preference at all.

At the end of each chapter, he does give you tips and writing lessons, which I did not do because I don't understand what he's talking about. I take reading at face value, no more or no less. If there is one thing that draws and holds my attention and interest, it is an author who can describe things so well that it is easy to visualize and feel like I'm there, or make me feel connected to the character so much that it draws a multitude of emotions from me. Now, that is a rare find! I have read many memoirs, and there are only a few that I have found were very well written:
1) Atchafalaya Houseboat: My Years in the Louisiana Swamp by Gwen Roland (one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read)
2) We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich
3) Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
4) The Emancipation of Robert Sadler by Robert Sadler

The very last chapter included a few tips that I would like to keep in mind because there have been those rare instances where, as I was reading certain books, I did stop to say, “Wow! That was profound! That was beautiful! I love that description!, etc…”

1. Begin with your routine habits, reading for information or the experience of story.

2. Look for passages that make you stop, not because they are bad but because they are so good that you want to enjoy and appreciate them.

3. Look for the part of the passage you like best: it could be a paragraph, a sentence, a metaphor, even a word.

4. If the passage comes from a book or magazine, mark it with a pencil, then write some words or phrases in the margins that describe what interests you. ( )

It's always fun to accompany Roy Peter Clark as he works his way through the world of literature, but this book might be slightly less helpful to writers compared to readers by dint of the texts that Clark selects. Sure, it's good to see how Nabokov got the ball rolling in his stories, or how Rachel Carson made your heart ache with her descriptions of the natural world, but the problem is that none of the likely readership of Clark's book will ever come close to achieving what Nabokov and Carson and all the other greats achieved in their work.

For me, the 'perfect' book for learning how to write has yet to be written. Focus should rather fall on the quotidian than on the singular. I want to know how to write the transition that takes my character out of their car and into the house, say, or how to write dinner-date dialogue better than that found in the Jack Reacher novels when the attention is away from Reacher's omnipotence. That book would be well worth reading, and would help enormously. As it is, I fear for the number of would-be writers, myself included, who might be tempted to emulate Nabokov or Harper Lee or Fitzgerald, but who will fail because there is such a fine line between homage and pastiche. ( )

Nothing here will be new to anyone who learned close reading in school, and Clark's brisk treatment of the excerpts he analyzes sometimes frustrated me. Charming enough, though!

This is, hands down, one of the best books on digging in-depth into how and why good writing works I may have ever read. And for me, that's saying a lot, because I've read a shit-ton of them.

That being said, I will say I was very close to putting it down after having gone through only a handful of pages. First of all, I will say right up front, while it's an appropriate term, I really hate (for some weird unknowable reason) the term "X-ray reading". Just sounds dumb to me.

But the bigger reason I almost set it down was because I thought I was in for a long, boring, protracted autopsy of books like I suffered through in high school English classes (Classes, I might add, where I frequently clashed with the teachers' interpretations of the novels we studied, and classes that completely turned me against Shakespeare's works for the next three decades).

But, I thought, give it a couple of chapters. If I still felt the same way then, then I'd put down the book, and walk away guilt-free.

I'm so glad I made that bargain. By the end of the second chapter, Clark had me hooked, and I was learning a lot, and beginning to understand both what I'd missed in my own readings of some of the works he discussed, but also filling with a better understanding of how to improve my own work.

You can't ask for more than that from a "how to write" book.

Absolutely highly recommended. ( )