When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’ Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë ’ s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’ s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.

“Reliably insightful.” – Publishers Weekly The first step to becoming a successful writer is to become a successful reader. Helping you develop your critical skills How to Read Like a Writer is an accessible and effective step-by-step guide to how careful reading can help you improve your craft as a creative writer, whatever genre you are writing in. Across 10 lessons – each pairing published readings with practical critical and creative exercises – this book helps writers master such key elements of their craft as: · Genre – from fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry to hybrid genres such as graphic narratives and online forms · Plot, conflict, theme and image · Developing characters – physical descriptions, psychological depths and actions · Narrators and points of view – 1st, 2nd and 3rd person narratives · Scenes and settings – time, space and place · Structure and form – length, organization and media · Language, subtext and style

Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts. Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.

Examines the theoretical underpinnings of how students learn to write from reading other writers; describes various kinds of inquiry designed to help teachers and students learn how to learn from writers; and includes thoughts from the author on writing and teaching, as well as a selection of resource materials.

Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspec- tives on a wide-range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by ad- dressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own ex- periences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about the craft of writing. Consequently, each essay func- tions as a standalone text that can easily complement other selected readings in writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level.

When the deacons at Mark Beaver's Bible Belt church cue up an evangelical horror flick aimed at dramatizing Hell, he figures he'd better get right with God, and soon. Convinced he could die at age seven and spend eternity roasting on a spit in the fiery furnace of Hades, he promptly gets Saved. But once adolescence hits, the Straight and Narrow becomes a tight squeeze. But Suburban Gospel offers more than a look inside Bible Belt suburbia, circa Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority--it's a tale of faith and flesh. Beaver invites us into a world filled with Daisy Duke fantasies and Prince posters, Nerf Hoops and Atari joysticks, raggedy Camaros and the neon light of strip malls. As much about the adolescent heart as the evangelical mind, the story explores similar emotional terrain as coming-of-age classics like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Mary Karr's Cherry. Suburban Gospel is a tale of growing up Baptist, all right--but also of just growing up.