Read Like A Writer: What Analytical Reading Can Teach Us

When it comes to reading, most of us look at it as a passive activity, but as writers’ more than our imagination should be engaged while reading. Once you learn to read as a writer, it will kind of demystify and disenchant reading for you, but at some point, if you want to get good at your craft and specifically, your genre, you’re going to have to learn to read like a writer and not just a reader. This blog post was written to help you actively move towards your goal of becoming a better writer by becoming increasingly more cognizant of the standard practice in novel writing.

So, How Do You Read Like A Writer?

Of course, it will vary depending on the genre, story, and your experience with reading, but the elements are typically the same. First, you will obviously be taking a more active and analytical approach to reading than just for research or entertainment purposes. Second, you’ll notice parts of the story as pieces rather than the big picture or overarching themes. Third, you’ll understand how everything comes together and you’ll be able to pick out certain things in one story that appear in other stories.

Story Structures and Story Beats

You can read about story structure formally—reading craft books, watching videos, following industry guides, or studying beat sheets—or it can be informal such as with movies and tv shows. After you understand the three-act-story-structure, you will become more aware of its uses in fiction across multiple genres.

Most stories are based off the three-act-story-structure. Try saying that five times fast—whew! I won’t go into too much detail about it because I have an extensive stack of freebies that discuss this topic at great lengths. However, I will say that this method of organizing and outlining story beats appears in almost every fiction novel/series and follows almost always the same format.

Check out my in-depth series on the three-act story structure here.

Whether it is informally or formally, you begin to learn the different parts of the story. As you are reading, notate these different story beats and decide if you like an author’s particular style or method in crafting these story beats. What you will notice is not only how the parts of the story work together, but where these story beats occur and when. Understanding where the parts of a story take place is incredibly important in crafting a well-paced story with just the right amount of tension and the right moments.

 Key Turning Points In The Reading Experience

The next aspect of reading like a writer is paying close attention to changes in the reading experience and looking out for key turning points that suggest major plot/pinch points are just around the corner. Here, I am literally telling you to track the reading experience—whether it be page numbers in a hard copy or percentages on Kindle—watch where in the novel, these turning point occur. Being a conscious reader who pays attention to where these key turning points happen can make you a better writer because when you sit down to work on your own writing, you have a better understanding of the preparation that is necessary prior to these turning points—i.e. rising and falling tension and lead-up.

Analyze Author Choices

Consider thoughtfully the choices the author made in crafting the novel. Think critically about the POV—the lens through which the story is told, tense of the story, setting, balance of narration and dramatization, and other story elements. Consider what techniques the writer chose to employ, in what places, and how that affects your experience both as a reader and a writer. What techniques did you enjoy? What techniques did you dislike? Writers can learn a lot about effective storytelling by examining the techniques and elements they don’t enjoy.

Additionally, pay close attention to voice, tone, and mood to understand what choices the writer made to create that specific reading experience. Is he/she using a humorous or snarky voice? Is the voice buzzing with energy—so much that it keeps the pages turning? It the voice dry and dragging? Consider all of these elements when reading because you will need to consider them when writing as well.

Zone In On Bad Books

To reiterate what I said in the previous section, writers can learn a lot about effective storytelling by examining the techniques and elements they don’t enjoy. Is the story boring? If so, what about the pacing is dragging for you? Could it be that the writing seems stagnant, that the writer is info-dumping, that the characters are spending too long engaging in mundane activities, are the characters being annoying, is there no tension or is the tension continuously building without mini-climaxes?

Person holding brown ceramic coffee mug next to a short stack of books. Photo by Parth Shah

Are these elements conscious choices on the part of the writer or subconscious? Of course, we will always be able to pick out what we don’t like about novels since we bring out own worldview, biases, and experience to the table when reading, but it’s worth mentioning that by making note of what we don’t enjoy in other novels we can then avoid it in our own writing.

Consider how you would fix a bad book. An awesome story idea I once found was to take the parts of the story that you really do like and use those to inspire a new book that you then can make better by avoiding the mistakes the other author made in their book. (I don’t mean plagiarizing or paraphrasing—give credit where it is due—but feel free to take a broad, general idea and run with it.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase, there’s nothing new under the sun, then you know immediately after you hear it, you feel all sad and dejected inside—that is until you don’t, because you know that no one can tell the story the way you can, but I digress.

The point is you can take a story that has a really great premise and do it differently. It’s a seriously eye-opening craft exercise to see if the thing you don’t like about a book truly make it bad or if they just don’t work for you. 

Analyze Your Favorites

The final tip for reading like a writer is of course, to reread your favorite stories with your craft hat on! This is the part where reading like a writer really can ruin book for you so tread carefully. But examine one of your favorite works and consider why you love it so much and what the writer does in each part of the novel that makes reading it an enchanting experience for you.

What choices has the writer made and what elements are they using to craft the story? Consider what strengths and weaknesses you both have and see how you can learn and strengthen the trouble spots in your writing. For instance, if you’re just awful at dialogue but you really enjoy how Becca Fitzpatrick does dialogue, read her books closely and see how she does it differently. Is this something you can learn? Is it something you can emulate? Is this a concrete craft hack that you can figure out for yourself? 

While the magic of some writer’s styles can’t exactly be taught, most of the elements of good writing and the things that make writers great can be learned. It just takes time, studying, and practicing consistently to hone the craft. Most of these things can be emulated and molded to fit your own writing style and once you have the building blocks you can create anything.

That’s it for my tips on how to read like a writer and how it can help you in your own writing career. Analytical and critical reading can help us understand parts of the story, what we both do and don’t enjoy in writing, and learn to emulate other writing styles to grow as a writer. This post might ruin leisurely reading for you forever, but it will also improve your writing in ways you never thought possible. What did you think of these tips and have you ever tried them before? Let me know your thoughts in the comment below!

—Payton

How I Got Started Reading When I Hated It

It might be surprising to learn that a published author, creative writer, and professional editor used to hate reading books. The truth is I wasn’t always an avid reader. To fully understand how my love for books, and more importantly—my love for stories has grown over the years, I have to back up to a time before I appreciated books.

I really learned how to read books in the third grade. I hated reading because I wasn’t good at it and thus, I wasn’t good at it because I hated it. It was a vicious cycle that repeated itself anytime my teacher assigned reading for homework. This resulted in me not doing so well in school and having to be held back in the third grade. I’m not ashamed of it now, but it made me feel like a complete failure. As I got older, I realized it was essential to my growth as a student, reader, and writer and I had no idea it would ultimately become my lifelong passion.

So, even though I’d learned how to read around first grade, I really learned to read proficiently during my second round of third grade. I had a kind, caring teacher who was really dedicated to helping me grow as a reader and worked with me to build my skill. Following the third grade, I almost instantly did better in all of my studies, passing tests with accuracy that was once gated by my reading inability.

Woman covering her face with a book. Photo by Siora Photography

 I began reading books from the Magic Tree House Series by Mary Pope Osborne and Barney the Bear-Killer, by Pat Sargent. I was drawn to Sargent’s story because of the cheetah on the cover of book seven in the series and reached for Osborne’s books of which I’d heard contained a magic tree-house that could take Jack and Sally anywhere they wanted to go. Between books that had to do my favorite animal, the cheetah, and endless adventures for kids, I had plenty of reading that I could connect with. These book series helped me to connect with compelling characters over a long stretch of books which kept me reading for a long time.

Games also helped better my reading abilities, which is why I am such a big advocate for giving children access to games. While video games are constantly under fire for promoting violence and toxic environments to children, I have to point out that playing World of Warcraft from the age of nine years old, has significantly benefited my reading skills. When I first started playing the MMO, my reading abilities weren’t too strong, and I had a lot of trouble reading game instructions and quest text. However, playing the games in combination with reading Sargent and Osborne, my reading proficiency increased.

Soon after I’d reached middle school, my family and I moved to Oklahoma and being the new girl, I turned to books until my friends found me. I got into graphic novels from James Paterson’s Maximum Ride Series and after falling in love with the characters from the manga books, I  began reading the full-length novels.

 In eighth grade, I attended Quartz Mountain Christian Camp for two weeks in the summer, and being new to the camp, I again turned to books. We had a lot of downtime in our cabins and with cell-phones off-limits, I decided to read a random book I’d packed in my suitcase on the off chance I’d get bored and have to read.

That’s exactly what happened, and the book I’d brought was Gillian Shield’s Immortal. This book was pivotal for me because it was the first time I’d read a book that I just couldn’t put down. It taught me a very important lesson in reading—there is a genre for everyone and if you don’t like reading, you just haven’t found the right genre. I didn’t know what genre it was yet, but I realized I had been reading all of the wrong books when I was younger and fantasy, romantic, thrillers, action novels and horror were where I should have been the whole time. (Okay, maybe horror isn’t something third graders should read, but still.)

My favorite genre to date, is the romantic thriller. I don’t know, maybe I really am one of those mushy, hopeless romantics after all, but there’s just something so compelling about supernatural love, forbidden romances, and tall, dark, handsome guys with way too much angst. What can I say? I think I have a type. Following Gillian Shield’s Immortal series, I dove straight into the Hush, Hush Saga, by Becca Fitzpatrick, which is my all-time favorite series to date. I’ve read it about eight times now, and I reach for the series every fall. (Except for 2019, where I got a little too excited a little too early and burned through the series in four days over the summer. Oops!)

By my freshman year of high school, I was so deep in the reading hole, I couldn’t get out. In one year, I’d read all of the Percy Jackson and Olympians series and Heroes of Olympus, both of which were written by Rick Riordan. That same year, I reread Maximum Ride, and read for the first time Gillian Shields new book, Destiny, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, and the Warcraft: War of the Ancients Archive by Richard A Knaak. This was a new record for me, because not only had I read so many books in one year, I also burned through the last book, which was thicker than my upper arm, with proficiency.

Since I’d fallen in love with the game, it’s lore, and it’s characters, I was more prepared than ever to take on this thick tome of game lore, character backstory, and history of the world of Azeroth, in which the game was set. I’ve read it twice since then and every time, I enjoy it because I remember how enchanted and enthralled I’d felt when I’d first read it.

As a third grader, I’d never imagined I’d ever read at the level I do now, and as an adult I can’t imagine a life without books. They’ve helped shape me into the woman I am today, and through reading, I have cultivated a love for books and stories. I love equally the process of reading and the process of telling a story—two process that go hand in hand since a writer cannot expect to better their craft without reading the works of others.

I highly recommend reading and if it’s not something you’re interested in right now, keep looking, because I assure you, you just haven’t found the right genre yet!

And that’s the end of my hot take on reading when it’s something you hate. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Thumbnail photo by Daria Shevtsova

—Payton