Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

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Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach episodes

July 05, 2017 Ep 108: When Writers Compare – The Good, Bad, and Ugly
As we seek out mentor texts to imitate or emulate, we encourage the mindset of comparison.

When I suggested you search out writing you admire, you’re going to be drawn to a writer you look up to, whose work dazzles when you compare it with your own. Naturally, this writer naturally seems superior to you in some way—otherwise, why would you select this author to learn from?

It’s appropriate to admire skilled authors, which is why Ben Franklin's method and straightforward copywork help us learn from the techniques employed by more experienced writers.

But as soon as we starting thinking in terms of better or worse, superior or inferior, more or less advanced, more or less prolific, more or less famous…we’re using the language of comparison to label who's better or worse than us at something. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of unhealthy comparison.
Comparison: The Good
Before we get to the not-so-good, let’s start with the good. The good news is that there are benefits to comparison. Really!
Aspirational Comparison
When we read people we admire, we see what’s possible—we aspire to write as well as this author or that blogger, this poet or that novelist. One day, we think, maybe I could write something as sharp and clear and scintillating as that.

And thanks to aspirational comparison, we might set a word count and get to work in hopes of improving and moving toward that level of excellence. That’s a good thing.
Discover Ideas and Solutions
Comparison leads to another good thing: When we compare ourselves to other writers, we look to their text to figure out how they handle the very things we struggle with.

We get ideas and solutions from the mentor text we choose—maybe they handle flashbacks with ease, for example, and know just went to end a chapter or stanza; they integrate ten-dollar words without sounding pretentious and make humor look easy.

So we compare their strengths with ours, spot their techniques, and decide if we can apply those to our own efforts and improve so that our own transitions seem more natural and our own chapters make the reader turn the page. By comparing their approach with ours, we see how to improve as a writer.
Critical Analysis Helps Writers Improve
Comparison really isn't a problem when we see ourselves as students seeking to improve, as professionals taking our work to the next level. MFA students read and analyze mentor texts all the time as part of their study. They discuss the strengths and learn how to apply similar approaches to their own work.

We don’t have to be in an MFA program to compare one short story or poem to another—or to our own—in hopes of improving. Critical analysis is essential to growing as a writer and represents comparison at its best as we learn from excellent texts.
Comparison: The Bad
When you started thinking through writers you admire—writers you’d like to emulate—did a range of thoughts and feelings squirm inside? Did you realize you don’t just admire those writers—you actually felt something negative as a result of reading and reviewing their work?

Maybe you started to compare their work with yours and felt inferior, like you’d never be able to write as capably as they do. You feel inadequate. You begin to doubt yourself and wonder why you even bother writing when others do it so much better than you ever will.

This is comparison gone bad.
When Comparison Diminishes Us
Comparison that leads to self-doubt and an inferiority complex can leave us frozen, unable to put another word down on paper. With social media, we compare followers and likes and shares and feel very small and insignificant compared to that writer with a major following or that author with a bestseller.

When we feel we don’t measure up to the talent that’s out th...
14 min
July 05, 2017 Ep 108: When Writers Compare - The Good, Bad, and Ugly
As we seek out mentor texts to imitate or emulate, we encourage the mindset of comparison.
When I suggested you search out writing you admire, you’re going to be drawn to a writer you look up to, whose work dazzles when you compare it with your own. Naturally, this writer naturally seems superior to you in some way—otherwise, why would you select this author to learn from?
It’s appropriate to admire skilled authors, which is why Ben Franklin's method and straightforward copywork help us learn from the techniques employed by more experienced writers.
But as soon as we starting thinking in terms of better or worse, superior or inferior, more or less advanced, more or less prolific, more or less famous…we’re using the language of comparison to label who's better or worse than us at something. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of unhealthy comparison.
Comparison: The Good
Before we get to the not-so-good, let’s start with the good. The good news is that there are benefits to comparison. Really!
Aspirational Comparison
When we read people we admire, we see what’s possible—we aspire to write as well as this author or that blogger, this poet or that novelist. One day, we think, maybe I could write something as sharp and clear and scintillating as that.
And thanks to aspirational comparison, we might set a word count and get to work in hopes of improving and moving toward that level of excellence. That’s a good thing.
Discover Ideas and Solutions
Comparison leads to another good thing: When we compare ourselves to other writers, we look to their text to figure out how they handle the very things we struggle with.
We get ideas and solutions from the mentor text we choose—maybe they handle flashbacks with ease, for example, and know just went to end a chapter or stanza; they integrate ten-dollar words without sounding pretentious and make humor look easy.
So we compare their strengths with ours, spot their techniques, and decide if we can apply those to our own efforts and improve so that our own transitions seem more natural and our own chapters make the reader turn the page. By comparing their approach with ours, we see how to improve as a writer.
Critical Analysis Helps Writers Improve
Comparison really isn't a problem when we see ourselves as students seeking to improve, as professionals taking our work to the next level. MFA students read and analyze mentor texts all the time as part of their study. They discuss the strengths and learn how to apply similar approaches to their own work.
We don’t have to be in an MFA program to compare one short story or poem to another—or to our own—in hopes of improving. Critical analysis is essential to growing as a writer and represents comparison at its best as we learn from excellent texts.
Comparison: The Bad
When you started thinking through writers you admire—writers you’d like to emulate—did a range of thoughts and feelings squirm inside? Did you realize you don’t just admire those writers—you actually felt something negative as a result of reading and reviewing their work?
Maybe you started to compare their work with yours and felt inferior, like you’d never be able to write as capably as they do. You feel inadequate. You begin to doubt yourself and wonder why you even bother writing when others do it so much better than you ever will.
This is comparison gone bad.
When Comparison Diminishes Us
Comparison that leads to self-doubt and an inferiority complex can leave us frozen, unable to put another word down on paper. With social media, we compare followers and likes and shares and feel very small and insignificant compared to that writer with a major following or that author with a bestseller.
When we feel we don’t measure up to the talent that’s out th...
14 min
June 27, 2017 Ep 107: Learn from the Best: Copywork for Grownups
Children used to be assigned copywork so they could practice penmanship and be exposed to great poetry, sayings, and passages from literature. But copywork’s not just for kids.
You may recall from Episode 106 that Ben Franklin’s method is similar to copywork: He picked an essay or article he read and admired, took a few notes on each sentence—just a word or two—set aside the original, and some time later tried to recreate the original using the hints he had written down. Like I said, it isn’t exactly the same as copywork, but it’s close.
Copywork is more meticulous than that. Like the scribes of old, a person devoted to copywork seeks to create an identical copy of the original text—an exact replicate.
Why bother with copywork?
You may ask, why would any ambitious, 21st-century adult writer bother with copywork?
It may seem like a childish activity. Why revert to past-century elementary-school training when we’re adults seeking to produce a creative, contemporary body of work?
Well, one advantage is that copywork forces close reading—it requires attentiveness to avoid skipping a word, missing a comma, or losing our place. That attentiveness is key to understanding a writer’s decisions. Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer:
Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. (16)
As a writer, then, we're making decisions with each word choice, each exclamation point, each series of three phrases that produces the rhythm we want to achieve. We can pick up some of this simply by reading, as Prose herself does. She says, "I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made" (3).
But when we copy out someone’s work, it’s even better, closer—we don’t miss a thing. We see it all, each and every decision, as it emerges in our writing notebook. Copywork documents the work of another writer so that the copyist is naturally, organically mentored by the original author.
Prose points out that close attention to a text offers "the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist. It’s something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing it from not only far away but also up close, in order to see the brushstrokes" (30).
By copying out the text, we're practically holding the pen of the author, forming letters as if we’re tracing the originals, to learn. That’s the goal: to learn.
Who bothers with copywork?
A website called The Art of Manliness claims that several well-known authors practiced copywork. They mention Jack London, who trained himself to be a better writer by copying out passages from Rudyard Kipling’s work. They report:
For hours at a time, and days on end, he would make it his assignment to copy page after page of Kipling’s works in longhand. Through such feverish effort, he hoped to absorb his hero’s rhythmic musicality and energetic cadence, along with the master’s ability to produce what one contemporary critic called “throat-grabbing phrase.”
They quote London as saying:
As to myself, there is no end of Kipling in my work. I have even quoted him. I would never possibly have written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been. True, true, every bit of it.
Self-taught by copying out the words of a writer he admired, London found his own voice and his own place in history.
Copywork from memory
You can take copywork to the next level following Robert Louis S...
10 min
June 27, 2017 Ep 107: Learn from the Best: Copywork for Grownups
Children used to be assigned copywork so they could practice penmanship and be exposed to great poetry, sayings, and passages from literature. But copywork’s not just for kids.

You may recall from Episode 106 that Ben Franklin’s method is similar to copywork: He picked an essay or article he read and admired, took a few notes on each sentence—just a word or two—set aside the original, and some time later tried to recreate the original using the hints he had written down. Like I said, it isn’t exactly the same as copywork, but it’s close.

Copywork is more meticulous than that. Like the scribes of old, a person devoted to copywork seeks to create an identical copy of the original text—an exact replicate.
Why bother with copywork?
You may ask, why would any ambitious, 21st-century adult writer bother with copywork?

It may seem like a childish activity. Why revert to past-century elementary-school training when we’re adults seeking to produce a creative, contemporary body of work?

Well, one advantage is that copywork forces close reading—it requires attentiveness to avoid skipping a word, missing a comma, or losing our place. That attentiveness is key to understanding a writer’s decisions. Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer:
Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. (16)
As a writer, then, we're making decisions with each word choice, each exclamation point, each series of three phrases that produces the rhythm we want to achieve. We can pick up some of this simply by reading, as Prose herself does. She says, "I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made" (3).

But when we copy out someone’s work, it’s even better, closer—we don’t miss a thing. We see it all, each and every decision, as it emerges in our writing notebook. Copywork documents the work of another writer so that the copyist is naturally, organically mentored by the original author.

Prose points out that close attention to a text offers "the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist. It’s something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing it from not only far away but also up close, in order to see the brushstrokes" (30).

By copying out the text, we're practically holding the pen of the author, forming letters as if we’re tracing the originals, to learn. That’s the goal: to learn.
Who bothers with copywork?
A website called The Art of Manliness claims that several well-known authors practiced copywork. They mention Jack London, who trained himself to be a better writer by copying out passages from Rudyard Kipling’s work. They report:
For hours at a time, and days on end, he would make it his assignment to copy page after page of Kipling’s works in longhand. Through such feverish effort, he hoped to absorb his hero’s rhythmic musicality and energetic cadence, along with the master’s ability to produce what one contemporary critic called “throat-grabbing phrase.”
They quote London as saying:
As to myself, there is no end of Kipling in my work. I have even quoted him. I would never possibly have written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been. True, true, every bit of it.
Self-taught by copying out the words of a writer he admired, London found his own voice and his own place in history.
Copywork from memory
You can take copywork to the next level following Robert Louis S...
10 min
June 20, 2017 Ep 106: Learn from the Best - Imitate but Don't Plagiarize
A brief word of warning: this is a longer-than-usual episode. Instead of falling within the typical five- to eight-minute range, this episode clocks in at over 11 minutes.
Are you a carnivorous reader?
Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer:
I’ve heard the way a writer reads described as “reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory for which author happens to do which thing particularly well. (31)
When we learn from the best—the greats—they become mentors. We do this by reading with an analytical eye and carnivorous mind to gain insights into what works and apply principles and actual techniques to our own projects.
In Episode 104, we talked about interacting with texts by writing in a book's margins, annotating as we go, which engages us at various levels with an analytical eye. It's an excellent practice to begin and continue with books you own.
Another way to read analytically for the purpose of improving as writers is to follow Benjamin Franklin’s method, which aligns nicely with Francine Prose’s description of carnivorous reading, or reading for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned.
Realizing Your Writing Falls Short
Early on, Benjamin Franklin’s father noted his son's “bookish inclination” and apprenticed him to Franklin’s brother, a printer, where Ben quickly learned the business.
This new situation gave Ben access to books he borrowed through a friend, exposing him to greater variety, including poetry, which he began to write. Benjamin’s father discouraged the poetry, warning that “verse makers were generally beggars.” Ben shifted to prose and explains in his autobiography how he improved his prose-writing skill.
He’d debate with a good friend of his and always found this other young man was "naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words, and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons."
They wrote each other when his friend couldn’t meet up in person for some reason, continuing to take sides on an unresolved argument, and Benjamin's dad happened to find the letters and read them. Franklin reported that his father noted:
though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow'd to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remarks, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement.
The Ben Franklin Method
To expand his vocabulary, grow more eloquent, and express himself more fluently, Ben devised a method. He bought a magazine called the Spectator, read it, and enjoyed it. He explains:
I thought the writing excellent and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
This simple system is easy to follow. As you can see from his explanation, the first steps are to find writing you admire and make "short hints of the sentiment in each sentence.”
My kids followed a writing program geared for K-12 students that introduced Franklin’s method. It comes from the Institute for Excellence in Writing.
12 min
June 20, 2017 Ep 106: Learn from the Best – Imitate but Don’t Plagiarize
A brief word of warning: this is a longer-than-usual episode. Instead of falling within the typical five- to eight-minute range, this episode clocks in at over 11 minutes.
Are you a carnivorous reader?
Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer:
I’ve heard the way a writer reads described as “reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory for which author happens to do which thing particularly well. (31)
When we learn from the best—the greats—they become mentors. We do this by reading with an analytical eye and carnivorous mind to gain insights into what works and apply principles and actual techniques to our own projects.
In Episode 104, we talked about interacting with texts by writing in a book's margins, annotating as we go, which engages us at various levels with an analytical eye. It's an excellent practice to begin and continue with books you own.
Another way to read analytically for the purpose of improving as writers is to follow Benjamin Franklin’s method, which aligns nicely with Francine Prose’s description of carnivorous reading, or reading for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned.
Realizing Your Writing Falls Short
Early on, Benjamin Franklin’s father noted his son's “bookish inclination” and apprenticed him to Franklin’s brother, a printer, where Ben quickly learned the business.
This new situation gave Ben access to books he borrowed through a friend, exposing him to greater variety, including poetry, which he began to write. Benjamin’s father discouraged the poetry, warning that “verse makers were generally beggars.” Ben shifted to prose and explains in his autobiography how he improved his prose-writing skill.
He’d debate with a good friend of his and always found this other young man was "naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words, and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons."
They wrote each other when his friend couldn’t meet up in person for some reason, continuing to take sides on an unresolved argument, and Benjamin's dad happened to find the letters and read them. Franklin reported that his father noted:
though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow'd to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remarks, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement.
The Ben Franklin Method
To expand his vocabulary, grow more eloquent, and express himself more fluently, Ben devised a method. He bought a magazine called the Spectator, read it, and enjoyed it. He explains:
I thought the writing excellent and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
This simple system is easy to follow. As you can see from his explanation, the first steps are to find writing you admire and make "short hints of the sentiment in each sentence.”
My kids followed a writing program geared for K-12 students that introduced Franklin’s method. It comes from the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Students read a source text, or "mentor text," then return to the beginning of the piece and write out two or three keywords per sentence...
12 min
June 13, 2017 Ep 105: There was never yet an uninteresting life – Visiting Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri
We stepped inside the cave entrance and followed our guide down narrow passageways to see its wonders. The Mark Twain Cave, a national landmark just outside Hannibal, Missouri, was the cave Samuel Langhorne Clemens explored in his youth and used as inspiration for the cave featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher separate from the group that had scampered up the hill to play hide-and-seek inside.

Our guide kept us moving along a corridor coined Grand Avenue, shining his flashlight down side passages to give us a glimpse of areas we weren’t allowed to explore. We could see how easy it would be to get turned around and lost, especially if we were like Tom and Becky, carrying candles when a hundred bats flocked down, darted at the light, and struck out the flame with their wings.

We heard that Jesse James used this cave as a hideout and signed his name on the wall, as did thousands of other visitors. We saw the signatures dating back to the 1800s, when tourists smoked their names onto the cave’s ledges and walls.

In the book, Clemens describes “a place where a little stream of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone.” We saw that.

He mentioned "rather over-descriptive names” of the cave's features, one of which was “Aladdin’s Palace,” and we saw that, too, with its curvy opening revealing a pool of water.

After the cave tour, we drove into town and stopped for coffee in an old building on Main Street, where we could look up and see the big sign for the Mark Twain Hotel. Just a block or so away, we walked to the edge of the river where the Mark Twain Riverboat awaited tourists, near a park next to the railroad tracks.

We toured the Mark Twain Boyhood Home on Hill Street—next to it stood a fence like the one Tom Sawyer's friends paid to have the privilege of whitewashing.

Across from his home is the Becky Thatcher House, where a girl named Laura lived, who served as the model for Becky. Next to that was the office of Judge Clemens, Justice of the Peace. Behind the houses, we stepped through a white shack reconstructed to represent Tom Blankenship’s home—Huckleberry Finn is based on this Tom.

These were the places Samuel Clemens knew best during his formative years. The town of Hannibal is where he learned to read and write. It’s where he collected sights, sounds, and smells. It’s where he met and got to know people who would populate his books as fictionalized versions of themselves.

Spending time in his world reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s quote, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days” (Mystery and Manners, 84). Samuel Clemens survived a sickly first few years of life to enjoy a small town youth that gave him enough information about life to last him the rest of his days and fill many of his works.

The rooms in the Clemens' humble home on Hill Street feature life-size figures of the author, unpainted, posed as a sort of ghost-like presence in each space. Posters display quotes from Twain’s work. In a bedroom, the Mark Twain figure stands at a window and looks out at the town, and on the accompanying poster is an excerpt from Life on the Mississippi:
After all these years I can picture [it] just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning…one or two clerks sitting in front of [the] stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall…hats slouched over their faces, asleep,…a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk,…two or three lonely little freight piles scattered around the ‘levee’…[and] the gr...
8 min
June 13, 2017 Ep 105: There was never yet an uninteresting life - Visiting Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri
We stepped inside the cave entrance and followed our guide down narrow passageways to see its wonders. The Mark Twain Cave, a national landmark just outside Hannibal, Missouri, was the cave Samuel Langhorne Clemens explored in his youth and used as inspiration for the cave featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom Sawyer […]
8 min
June 06, 2017 Ep 104: Learn from the Best – The Book Is Yours When You Write in Its Margins
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King
You’ll hear that advice a lot. You want to write? Read a lot and write a lot. Simple as that.

But is it that simple?

Do we simply open the book, read and enjoy the story or helpful ideas, and automatically absorb the content? Or do we need to read with a plan or a strategy of some kind?

Is there a way to take in and retain the content, be inspired by the style, and learn methods to apply to our own work?

Is there a writerly way to read?

I think there is. So do many others. Let’s start with the content. How do we grasp it, absorb it, retain it?
Plagued by Lack of Retention?
Someone asked me the other day if I’d read Great Expectations. I had. I read it and remember enjoying it. But I couldn’t recall much detail at all. There's Pip, right? And Miss Havisham sitting around in that ratty old wedding dress? That’s about all I could dredge up.

I've read lots of books—I was an English Major, for crying out loud! So I read and wrote response papers about gobs of great literature, countless classics, over the course of my studies—but my recall?

After years of academic effort, it feels like only shadowy memories flit across my mind for many titles I was assigned, maybe a scene or an interaction between characters—that tattered old wedding dress of Miss Havisham’s, for example. I wish more works were locked in in their full glory, the plot, themes, and characters remembered more accurately, beginning to end.
Make a Book a Part of Yourself: Write in It
As a young adult, post-college, I encountered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book written with Charles Van Doren and subtitled “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” Adler wrote:
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. (49)
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself…and yourself a part of it.

How do we make it part of ourselves? You heard it. Adler insisted that to “own” a book, we must write in it.
Resistance to Marginalia
My parents never let me write in a book. The mere thought of marking a page was an abomination. Sacrilege. Verboten.

My parents love to read and have strong retention, yet they never marked up books, at least not that I saw. I had been taught what Anne Fadiman calls a “courtly love” of books. They insisted I treat the book itself—the printed book and its pages—with the utmost respect. Leave the pages clean and free of marks for your next reading or for someone else’s. Let them enjoy it without any marginalia to distract them. Our family's books are pristine.

In Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, Fadiman explains the attitude of the courtly, Platonic love of books versus a carnal love of them:
The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one's own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I'd later erase). But I've been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. (Fadiman 41)
In college, I struggled to highlight and underline key passages and information, even though I could plainly see from the used textbooks I purchased that everyone did it. Eventually, I caved and with pencil lightly marked passages I thought I should note for tests and papers. Each time I underlined a passage or circled a word or wrote a comment or drew an arrow, I felt…naughty.
Dialogue with Authors
But I needed to dialogue with the authors. I needed to enter the conversation. I needed to write in books.
8 min
June 06, 2017 Ep 104: Learn from the Best - The Book Is Yours When You Write in Its Margins
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King
You’ll hear that advice a lot. You want to write? Read a lot and write a lot. Simple as that.
But is it that simple?
Do we simply open the book, read and enjoy the story or helpful ideas, and automatically absorb the content? Or do we need to read with a plan or a strategy of some kind?
Is there a way to take in and retain the content, be inspired by the style, and learn methods to apply to our own work?
Is there a writerly way to read?
I think there is. So do many others. Let’s start with the content. How do we grasp it, absorb it, retain it?
Plagued by Lack of Retention?
Someone asked me the other day if I’d read Great Expectations. I had. I read it and remember enjoying it. But I couldn’t recall much detail at all. There's Pip, right? And Miss Havisham sitting around in that ratty old wedding dress? That’s about all I could dredge up.
I've read lots of books—I was an English Major, for crying out loud! So I read and wrote response papers about gobs of great literature, countless classics, over the course of my studies—but my recall?
After years of academic effort, it feels like only shadowy memories flit across my mind for many titles I was assigned, maybe a scene or an interaction between characters—that tattered old wedding dress of Miss Havisham’s, for example. I wish more works were locked in in their full glory, the plot, themes, and characters remembered more accurately, beginning to end.
Make a Book a Part of Yourself: Write in It
As a young adult, post-college, I encountered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book written with Charles Van Doren and subtitled “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” Adler wrote:
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. (49)
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself…and yourself a part of it.
How do we make it part of ourselves? You heard it. Adler insisted that to “own” a book, we must write in it.
Resistance to Marginalia
My parents never let me write in a book. The mere thought of marking a page was an abomination. Sacrilege. Verboten.
My parents love to read and have strong retention, yet they never marked up books, at least not that I saw. I had been taught what Anne Fadiman calls a “courtly love” of books. They insisted I treat the book itself—the printed book and its pages—with the utmost respect. Leave the pages clean and free of marks for your next reading or for someone else’s. Let them enjoy it without any marginalia to distract them. Our family's books are pristine.
In Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, Fadiman explains the attitude of the courtly, Platonic love of books versus a carnal love of them:
The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one's own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I'd later erase). But I've been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. (Fadiman 41)
In college, I struggled to highlight and underline key passages and information, even though I could plainly see from the used textbooks I purchased that everyone did it. Eventually, I caved and with pencil lightly marked passages I thought I should note for tests and papers. Each time I underlined a passage or circled a word or wrote a comment or drew an arrow, I felt…naughty.
Dialogue with Authors
But I needed to dialogue with the authors. I needed to enter the conversation. I needed to write in books.
8 min

About Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

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With Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, you'll gain clarity and overcome hurdles to become a better writer, pursue publishing, and reach your writing goals. Ann provides practical tips and motivation for…