How did the author do that??
As you read, you can think about what's working for you, and why.
My third-grader has to write Reading Responses for homework: her teacher sent home a list of questions, and she has to pick one to answer about a book she’s reading. This week, we’ve been reading The 13-Story Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton, and my daughter chose to answer the following question:
How does the author make this part feel exciting, calm, scary, or funny?
I’ll preface her response by saying that this is a very silly book. The particular chapter we read right before she did her writing assignment involved the two main characters of the book inventing a heroic index finger character named…Superfinger. Superfinger saves the day by swooping in to help citizens with “problems requiring finger-based solutions.”
My child tapped her pencil on the table, thinking, and then painstakingly printed:
“Superfinger unclogged a kid’s nose! It is funny because it is descusting.”
She’s not wrong! (Aside from how she spelled “disgusting,” but we’re still working on spelling. She’s eight.) Gross-out humor is a hallmark of books for her age bracket.
I liked that this writing assignment made her consider and articulate why she was laughing. How did the authors make that specific chapter extra-funny? (They added just the right amount of “descusting.”)
Meanwhile, observing my daughter as she worked on her Reading Response reminded me how much I enjoy cracking stories open to figure out what’s making them tick.
Obviously, this is an incredibly useful skill for writers to cultivate.
As I read, I constantly find myself considering what the author is doing to make me feel a certain way. How are the words and sentences strung together to elicit smiles, tears, or chills? How is the author setting a certain tone or mood? How is tension built up or released? If I can articulate what someone else is doing in their work, I can take that knowledge back to my own writing.
Honestly, I enjoyed this process well before I was writing books, myself. I was an English major in college (technically a double-major, English and dance), and as you can imagine, those English literature classes involved a lot of analysis. One of my favorite undergrad courses was a semester-long deep-dive into Hamlet. In addition to reading the original play slowly, scene-by-scene, we also read more recent works that were inspired by Hamlet, and we watched multiple film versions of the play. We examined Hamlet under a microscope. It was fascinating.
Of course, you don’t have to assess everything you read with this microscopic level of attention, but—especially if you’re a writer—there is a lot of value to occasionally slowing down and asking yourself, how did the author do that??
Not sure where to begin?
Here are a few things you might observe!
Keep in mind that a lot of this will be subjective. What works for you won’t work for every reader. You’re not trying to determine whether the story is told in the “right” way—because there isn’t a single right way. Instead, you’re asking yourself, what is the author doing, and what effect does what they’re doing have on you, as a reader?
Pacing:
Do the events of the story feel like they’re unfolding at the correct speed? I consider this not only in terms of the internal timeline of the plot (i.e. if the book takes place over a day, a week, or a year), but also in terms of how many pages the author allots to each scene.
Does anything feel skipped or glossed over? Conversely, do you feel like too much time is being devoted to something that’s seemingly not as pivotal? Why do you think the author might have made that choice?
Sentence/paragraph structure:
Does the author tend to use longer, more stream-of-consciousness sentences, or short, crisp, choppy ones? Or a mix?
Does their pattern of writing elicit an emotional response? (For instance, a run-on sentence could feel leisurely and calm, while a series of broken sentence fragments might feel breathless and anxious.)
How does it feel to you when, after a lengthy, winding paragraph, you get a single brief sentence on its own line?
Do different characters speak or narrate in different ways, or does the author have a more cohesive writing style regardless of which character is speaking or narrating?
Fulfilled expectations versus subverted ones:
When something big happens in the plot, do you feel a sigh of relief, as though everything you’ve read has been leading to this? Or were you expecting something else to happen?
If you were expecting something else, are you surprised and delighted, or do you feel frustrated? Were there any clues you missed, pointing to the twist? Or did the author pull an unwarranted (at least, to you) bait-and-switch?
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there!
Hopefully, those three examples give you a sense of the kinds of things you can take note of as you read—even if you’re not doing a homework assignment on the book.
(As an aside on the topic of homework: one year, in elementary school, I didn’t turn in a single book report, reasoning that the teacher should just trust me when I said I’d read the books. (I went to a Montessori school, in which we did “self-directed learning,” so it took a lot longer than it should have for people to realize I wasn’t doing those writing assignments.) Little did I know that one day, I would go to college specifically to write book reports…)
Are there certain things an author does that tend to jump out to you, as you read?
Oh, and if all else fails, remember my daughter’s words:
“It is funny because it is descusting.”
Until next week,
~Kathryn