Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Francine Proseamazon.com
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write. E. B. White is one of my favorite stylists because I’m conscious of being with a man who cares about the cadences and sonorities of the language. I relish (in my ear) the pattern his words make as they fall into a sentence. I try to surmise how in rewriting the sentence h
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. [2]
Paul Graham: Essays • The Need to Read
“Reading is letting someone else model the world for you. This is an act of intimacy. When the author is morose, you become morose. When he is mirthful, eventually you may share in it. And after finishing a very good book one is driven a little mad, forced to return from a world that no one nearby has witnessed. ...
248 / Tips on how to read well
Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?)
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org