“Read with purpose” is one of the three pillars of DIY MFA, but it’s often the most overlooked. It’s easy to see how writing and community can contribute to our literary development, but sometimes reading can fall by the wayside. Today I wanted to talk about the importance of reading with purpose, what exactly it entails, and how to do it.
The Importance of Reading with Purpose
When I used to interview guest authors on DIY MFA Radio, I used to end each episode with the same question: “What’s your #1 tip for writers?” Hands down, the most common answer to that question was: “Read, read, read,” and it’s no wonder why. Reading is one of the most crucial parts of a literary life. If writers want to improve their craft, they need to read.
A writer who doesn’t read is like a chef who doesn’t eat. They have no idea if what they’re creating is any good because they can’t put their work into context. Reading with purpose allows us to see how our books fit in the greater literary landscape and understand how to make our writing better. It also allows us to see how other writers solve certain problems and we can borrow those solutions and apply them to our own work.
Note that this doesn’t mean we are copying someone else’s writing, not by a long shot. Instead, think of it as like being a mechanic, looking under the hood of a car to see how it works. When we read with purpose, we analyze another writer’s work to see how they do things, then we apply the concepts to our own writing to make it better. We’re not copying the author’s actual words or ideas, but we’re looking at the way they do things and then borrowing some of those strategies.
What Reading with Purpose Entails
Reading with purpose means reading with an eye toward your writing. It means having a core set of books on hand—what I call “the essentials”—so you have ready resources when you need them. It means being strategic when you select books, so your reading will help you with your current work-in-progress. Most importantly, it means reading with an analytical perspective, so you can understand more fully how a piece of literature works, and apply some of those concepts to your own writing. There are three important components of reading with purpose:
- Having a select group of essential books on hand
- Compiling a reading list that servers our goals
- Reading with a writer’s eye
Essential Books to Have on Hand
There are three books that I recommend every writer have in their library. I know what you’re thinking—only three? Yes, you only need three, and these three will be different for each writer. If you’re like most writers, you probably have more than one book in each of these categories, but at the minimum I recommend having one of each. To remember the three books, just think of your ABCs.
- A = Anthology of Short Form Work
- B = Book of Prompts
- C = Craft Reference
Anthology of Short Form Work: It’s useful to have an anthology of short stories, preferably in your chosen genre. If you write memoir, then look for an anthology of essays, and if you write poetry, get your hands on an anthology of poems. Make sure that what you choose is a true anthology with stories by a variety of authors and not a collection by a single author. This is because you want a book that represents the broadest possible range of voices. My go-to short story anthology is The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. It’s not super-new but it has the classics.
Book of Prompts: A book of prompts is always good to have on hand. I’m especially a fan of prompt books that are organized according to topic (dialogue prompts in one chapter, description prompts in another, etc.). The two prompt books I recommend are: The 3 A.M. Epiphany (and its sequel, The Four A.M. Breakthrough) by Brian Kiteley and the Now Write! series edited by Sherry Ellis and Laurie Lamson. Both series group the prompts by category, only in the Kiteley books, the prompts are by only one author, while in the Now Write! series, the prompts are from various different authors.
Craft Reference: It’s helpful to have a craft reference handy in case you run into questions you don’t know how to answer. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is, of course, the classic for matters regarding style and grammar. For broader craft topics, I love books by Donald Maass, Lisa Cron, and Steven James. For “small craft” (i.e., sentence-level stuff) check out Barbara Baig’s Spellbinding Sentences. And, of course, the DIY MFA book also gives an overview of general craft topics.
Building a Reading List
One of the most important parts of reading with purpose is compiling a reading list that truly serves your writing. I remember in the MFA program, reading some books that were completely irrelevant to what I was writing. I kept wondering “what’s the point?” It felt a bit like an exercise in futility. That’s why, when I started DIY MFA, one of the first things I did was develop a rubric so that writers could come up with their own reading list, their own syllabus. This rubric consists of four types of books:
- Comps: Comparable books (i.e., comps) are similar to your book and would sit on the bookstore shelf next to yours. If a librarian were to recommend a book similar to yours, they would choose one of these comps.
- Contextual: These are books you read for research. They may not be similar to your book in all respects, but they may have certain aspects in common, like the same setting, or a similar use of point of view. These books lend context to yours.
- Contemporary: You need to keep your finger on the pulse of your genre or category. This is why it’s important to read a few contemporary books, so you can be aware of trends and know what’s new in your niche.
- Classics: Everyone should read a classic at least once in a while. Keep in mind, classics don’t necessarily need to be hundreds (or thousands) of years old. Depending on your genre or category, books considered classics might actually be fairly recent.
Reading Like a Writer
I often call reading like a writer “reading like a revolutionary.” This is because when we read with a writer’s eye, we aren’t just passively taking in the story. Instead, we are actively analysing it, not just to understand, but to apply the concepts to our own writing. The key to reading like a writer is examining how the author does what they do on the page, and then considering which of those techniques you can borrow.
How to Read with Purpose
Reading with purpose is like swimming in the ocean: the swimmer is the reader and the ocean is the story. Like the ocean, the story has different layers of depth and reader-swimmers can explore some or all of those layers, depending on their inclination.
Ocean Surface: The WHAT
Most readers/swimmers skim across the surface, because that’s where the air is. At this surface level, they focus on the WHAT of the story (i.e., the logistics). At this level, the reader is con What’s happening? Who are the characters? What is the setting?
These basic, logistical considerations are what we focus on, particularly when we’re first developing as readers. These are the types of questions my kids would have to answer for homework in elementary school. They don’t require deep analysis, just a basic understanding of the facts.
There is nothing wrong with hanging out at the surface. That’s how most people read much of the time. This is the layer where you simply get carried away by a good story, and that’s a perfectly respectable way to read. But, if you want to read like a writer, you have to go deeper.
Coral Reef: The WHY
The second layer of reading is that in-between space between the ocean surface and the ocean floor. Imagine this layer as being like a coral reef with hundreds of colorful fish, lush corals, and brightly patterned shells. This reef represents the WHY of the story (i.e., the interpretation).
This is the layer where we consider deeper, more analytical questions. What does this story mean? Why did the author write this story? How does this story fit into the greater literary context? This is how we were taught to read in high school or college literature classes. We learned to go deeper than pure logistics, but still not quite all the way to the ocean floor.
Keep in mind, reading at this layer can be hard to sustain and you can’t do it indefinitely, just as a swimmer can’t stay underwater for hours on end. Instead, when we analyze literature in this way, we usually do so for contained, specific passages, rather than for the entirety of a book-length work.
Ocean Floor: The HOW
Finally, we get to the third layer. For this one, imagine you’re bobbing along on the surface of the ocean and then you spot a sparkling gem on the ocean floor. Then, you take a deep, gulping breath and you dive all the way to the bottom to retrieve it.
This is what we do when we read for the HOW. We look deep at another author’s work and we spot the gems, and we analyze what that author is doing to understand how exactly they managed to pull it off. Then, we take that gem and we see how we might apply it to our own work.
As with the coral reef layer, this deep dive is difficult to sustain for long passages. We can analyze a writer’s work at this profound level only for short passages. If we try to read an entire book at the ocean floor level, it will be very challenging. This is why reading like a writer is a delicate, aquatic dance, where we continuously shift up and down, from the surface to the ocean floor.
Personalized Anthology Project
One activity I often recommend to writers is to compile a personalized anthology. Whenever you read something and you come across a passage that captures your attention, make a photocopy and put it in a binder. Annotate each excerpt using the WHAT/WHY/HOW framework and once you have ten or more of them in the binder, sort them according to topic (character development, story structure, world-building, description, dialogue, etc.)
The idea here is that over time, you will amass a collection of excerpts specifically from books that are relevant to your writing—because they’re books you selected, not someone else like a professor. The fact that the passages are sorted by topic will make it easier for you to find what you need. Stumped by setting? Look at some of the world-building excerpts in your binder. Not only will they help you figure out craft-related techniques, but they will be directly relevant to what you’re writing.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
