Paperwallah. Reading like a writer

We are at 8,000 ft above sea level, nestled in an apple orchard in Parvati Valley, sitting in the sunshine with a vast view of the mountains. I’m conducting a workshop for a small group of young aspiring writers, and it hasn’t been easy to decide on the theme. What should I focus on? What would be most useful? Unlike the luxury of a creative writing module spread over 13 weeks at Ashoka University, where I teach, I have a single morning. It doesn’t help that Mahima Sood, the organiser of the writing retreat, is extremely relaxed. “Anything,” she replies when I ask what she’d like me to do.

It is best to keep it broad, I thought, but there is the danger with variety — dilution. Eventually I decide to base the theme on what I consider Creative Writing 101. “Today,” I tell the participants, “we’re going to learn to read like a writer.”

If someone were to ask me why, I’d find it easy to explain.

Having not ‘graduated’ from formal training in writing (read MFA), the teachers I return to time and again lie stacked on my bookshelves. Everything I’ve learned about writing, I’ve learned from the books that I’ve read through my life.

In many workshops, as in many creative writing classes, teachers stress on the importance of reading. I do too. In fact, I usually share an anecdote involving a contemporary Indian writer (who shall remain unnamed) who, when asked what books he read, replied, allegedly, “I don’t read books, I write books.”

And, we all concur, it shows.

But it isn’t enough, I insist, to just read. One must read as a writer.

What exactly does this mean?

In Francine Prose’s now iconic book, Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them , it entails reading for pleasure first, but also “more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed, and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.” All this is theoretically sound, but how does one put it to practice?

For this workshop, I’ve shared the first seven chapters of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader . I like that the title of the novel alludes to what we’re discussing, that the theme — that of reading, or rather non-reading, as ethical blindness — also plays fittingly into our discussion. For those unfamiliar with the book (and the movie adaptation starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes), Schlink’s novel opens in post-war Germany, with 15-year-old Michael embarking on an affair with Hanna, a woman more than twice his age. Hanna disappears, and then turns up years later on trial as a former guard in a Nazi concentration camp. What happens after chapter seven, for the time being, is irrelevant. The thing to do, I tell my students, is ask the text questions.

Why open with a weak and unwell protagonist, throwing up on the street, helped by Hanna, a stranger? Perhaps because we, as readers, as humans, are drawn to the vulnerable. We are immediately on their side. We wish to help, to protect. Why has Schlink employed the first-person narrative? Because it adds urgency, immediacy; it is confessional in tone. As readers, we feel special, as though the narrator and us are friends, as though we’re being told a secret.

I ask the group what would happen if the point of view was handed to someone else in the cast of characters? There is silence, murmurings, and hesitation. Someone ventures, “Because if the story was told by Hanna, we wouldn’t have time to get to know her before we had to judge her.”

And the questions continue — how does Schlink employ memory? How does he slip between the past and the present? Why does he use an adult narrator looking back into the past? What purpose do the dreams serve, the ones that take an entire chapter to describe? The morning flies past. We are looking at the text critically, we are dismantling it carefully in our hands, and examining it as a jeweller would a rare, precious stone.

To read as a writer is to ask why.

Why this and not that? This way and not the other? This piece of information here and not there. This structure and not some other. We need to ask why because writing is intention. Figuring out this intention, sometimes in the quiet privacy of our rooms, teaches us more about writing than any classroom can. One needs to ponder, as Prose puts it, “every deceptively simple decision the writer has made.”

As we reach the end of the workshop, the participants wish to retreat to revisit the seven chapters again. They will do so slower, they say, with more care and attention. They will take their time. Prose says she remembers the novels and stories that seemed to her revelations: “Wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.” One of mine would be The Reader . Now go forth, I tell my class, and find your own.

Janice Pariat

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart