Writing Memoir: Reading Like a Writer
This shelfie is a hot mess. But my reading-like-a-writer habits are totally together.
The last time I moved house, I tried, as I always do, to arrange books alphabetically by author after separating them into broad categories like fiction, poetry, nonfiction. Inevitably, though, they end up looking like this photo. Probably a reflection of my hot mess mind.
I’m usually reading four or five books at a time and also listen to audio books. It could be that social media has warped my once linear, one-subject-at-a-time brain into something that can multi-task. A little.
When reading or listening to a book, I’m always on the lookout for something I can pluck out and make note of for my own evil purposes.
Reading like a writer means noticing techniques, images, or language you admire in other people’s work, and imagining how you could integrate such elements into your own writing.
In other words, it’s about stealing, which I wrote about at greater length here.
Here’s an example: I’m listening to Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvaging the Bones now. The novel’s protagonist is in high school, and over the summer she’s reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a book I, too, read at a young age. In one scene with her brothers, she’s reminded of how Medea, seeing her brother killed (Or perhaps killing him herself. There are alternate versions), says she’s seeing her own face cut. Medea and her brother resemble one another, so she sees herself in him.
It’s a powerful image, and it seemed so right for my current memoir project, which is about reuniting with my birth family. I realized that one reason my brothers’ suffering pained me so was because when they were beaten, it was my lips that split, my eyes that were blackened. When they punched through walls in frustration, it was my hands that were broken.
So I stole that language and image from Jessamyn Ward, who stole it from her interpretation of Edith Hamilton, who stole it from one of the many scribes who recorded stories of Medea.
Stealing is a great literary tradition.
For purposes of reading-like-a-writer, I don’t think it matters what genre you read. Fabulous literary gems, just waiting to be stolen, can be found in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. I’m writing a memoir, and Ward’s book is fiction, but it’s been very useful to me. She’s also the author of the excellent memoir, Men We Reaped, but that has no bearing on the relevance of the Medea image to my own story.
Some writers avoid reading work in their own genre while immersed in their own writing project. Their logic is that the other author’s work will infect theirs. But I welcome the infection and have no illusions that my work is “unique.”
All writers stand on the shoulders of the poets and storytellers of the past. Reading like a writer is a way of honoring our forebears and acknowledging the unbroken connection between us.
So go ahead. Read like a writer, notice the gems, and figure out how to fit them into to your own crown of creation.
