Reay Jespersen

I was reading a book this morning - Never The Bride by Paul Magrs - and at a moment in one of the short stories, just when I was getting into it, I read a paragraph that made me mentally step back and analyze what had been done in the writing in order to achieve a certain effect. And it occurred to me that on the one hand, having that happen is a compliment to the writer, but on the other hand is frustrating for me.

I’ve been writing stories on and off all my life, and have explored various different formats over the years. I’ve learned from books on honing writing skills and have attended seminars relevant to my work; studying, in short, how to be a better writer. A big part of that studying, of course, is reading.

When you read, you learn how to construct sentences, paragraphs, and stories. You learn structures, nuances, and styles. You learn what works and what doesn’t (and more importantly, why it does or doesn’t). And even if you don’t deconstruct what you read - consciously tear it apart to see how and why it works - reading gradually influences how, and the quality with which, you write.

However, as the saying goes, you can’t unlearn something. Once you’ve read up on, say, techniques to help make a scary scene more scary, it’s all too easy to find yourself reading scary scenes and mentally ticking off techniques that have been used rather than being swept away in the story itself.

It doesn’t happen to me all the time, of course. There are writers - Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, George RR Martin, Terry Pratchett, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy, to name a few off the top of my head - whose work is so well written and engrossing that it’s only when I put their books down between readings that I pull back from the tales they weave to consider how they managed to do what they do (invariably with envy).

Which brings me to the conundrum: is it possible for writers to at least mute their writer-ness long enough to enjoy anything at all that they read to avoid this intermitent, disruptive studying of the material, or is it only personally preferred writers and (types of) stories that we can look forward to enjoying purely as its intended entertainment?

So I’d be interested to hear: if you’re a writer, do you have this same problem with some of what you read? Which authors don’t you have this problem with? Whose work do you find yourself blissfully engrossed within, be it for particular stories or again and again? Might we be able to learn from them? Is just being a good writer enough to potentially be this distractingly engaging to other writers, or can we learn specific lessons from the masters about how to be this engaging?

What are your thoughts?