Roy Peter Clark is one of my favourite literary instructors and his bestselling book Writing Tools totally sold me on this one: The Art of X-Ray Reading.
If you are interested in learning how to read and gain greater insights from great books, this is a wonderful journey through the best that literature has to offer.
I love analysing and savouring the art of great literary works. But every now and then what I really enjoy is reading about reading.
I love geeking out and watching a master literary analyst like Clark take apart the writings of artists like Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Chaucer, Yeats, Homer, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Joyce, Flaubert, Melville, and more.
This book was a real treat and a major kick up the backside for me to start reading classic works again.
The Art of X-Ray Reading dedicates 25 chapters to different topics or writers and ends each one with a series of writing lessons that you can immediately apply to your own works.
The Art of X-Ray Reading: Some of my favourite writing lessons
The Art of X-Ray Reading is stuffed with gems that will enhance your writing craft.
It’s hard to select just a few of my favourites, but here’s goes…
All quotes are taken from Roy Peter Clark’s The Art of X-Ray Reading.
With age and multiple readings comes insight. What do I see in the novel that I was blind to fifty years earlier? The author remains the same (still dead); the text – in spite of disagreements among editors about the author’s intentions – has been established (very much alive); so I, the reader, become the X factor.
One of my favourite parts of The Art of X-Ray Reading is its call for you to return to the books that you loved.
Clark details how repeated readings of The Great Gatsby always offer him new perspectives and renewed appreciation of the work.
Who you are at different stages of your life will influence what you look for and find in great works of art.
What great works do you revisit?
I seem to remember Hemingway in an interview said that he revisits King Lear and the writings of Mark Twain every few years.
For me, I continually revisit Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and always find new things to move me.
‘To fully appreciate [the ending of The Great Gatsby] you might borrow a trick from my old friend Steve Lovelady and copy it out by hand. “I want to get the feel of what it’s like to have that prose flowing through my fingers.”
This is a great tip to improve your writing.
Copy out your favourite passages and sentences by hand.
The ending of Gatsby, any part of Heart of Darkness, how Baker describes birds in flight in The Peregrine…
When you do this, you’ll feel like you’ve swallowed two ounces of very good booze, as Mr Vonnegut might say.
You’ll become drunk on this beautiful writing.
You might even find yourself whipped up into a fury, to borrow a phrase from Herr Herzog, and be driven to create your own art.
Quoting from Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature: ‘Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain – the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed – then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavour will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.’
Amen to that.
Arts students at Oxford used to complain about how the incessant analysing of great works was destroying their appreciation of them.
I used to be one of them.
But after many years of continued reading, I’ve come to a similar conclusion as Nabokov (though could never verbalise it as beautiful as he did).
Without analysing great works, breaking them down into their smallest parts and meditating upon them, our appreciation is only surface level.
With greater attention comes greater appreciation precisely because we have contributed something of our own blood.
‘Language exists first as a set of symbolic sounds. Written language comes much later to signify those sounds, twice removed from the thing itself, a sign of a sign. Stay in tune with the oral and aural forms of stories. When you find strong passages such as the ones in this book, read them aloud before you x-ray them. Then stay in the habit of reading your own texts aloud (a) to hear strengths and weaknesses, (b) to test for rhythm and tone, (c) to hear the voice, and (d) to play the music of the words.’
Every writer can benefit from this habit.
I remember being taken aback by the beauty of Ransom Rigg’s prose in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
It’s not often you see a YA author building beautiful sentences.
But it made sense after I read an interview with Riggs.
He would read poetry and works from authors like Cormac McCarthy and let the poetry seep into his subconscious.
All writers must stay drunk on writing, as Ray Bradbury said.
We do that by reading our works, and the works of others, aloud, rolling them around in our mouths, tasting them.
‘In your research, hunt for and gather the names of the things you write about. Get the name of the dog, the make and model of the sports car, the brand of the beer. Ask over and over: What is that called? Does it have a name? Names have a special language and cultural power when expressed in lists, catalogs, phone books, litanies, yearbooks, rosters, ships’ logs, and blogs. A name is a tool to project an overview of character, ethnicity, generation, gender. When you are reading fiction, imagine that every syllable of every name has a meaning. Why does the lover of Lolita have the same first and last name?’
I first noticed the power of this when I went through a stage of binge-reading Stephen King novels.
I think he even says something about this in his superb memoir On Writing.
You don’t open your medicine cabinet at home and see a bunch of nameless bottles and boxes.
You see Tylenol and Pepto Bismol, goddamnit.
You don’t go to the fridge and pop open a beer.
You crack open an ice-cold bottle of Bud.
Names contain power, poetry, and paint a picture.
Clark is bang on the money with this one.
‘Repetition is different from redundancy. Don’t strain yourself looking for synonyms. I’ll point this lesson out several times in this book. Think of repetition as a drumbeat. Somehow, a marching drummer can repeat a rhythm countless times without making it sound tedious. After a while, the rhythm becomes unnoticeable, almost like a heartbeat. But it must be done for effect and with purpose. Beware of those times when you unintentionally repeat a word or image. Readers will judge you as inattentive.’
This isn’t a lesson about repetition.
This is really a lesson about conscious decisions.
Why are you choosing this word instead of that word?
What effect are you going for?
‘Nature need not cooperate and often should not. To create an appropriate setting and landscape for a story, the weather has to do something, but it need not align itself with the will of human beings. Happy times can occur in blizzards. The sun smiles down on bloody killers. The more realistic your work, the more unpredictable the connection between the elements outside and the internal landscape of character and motive.’
This is a great piece of advice, one I already came to myself but would like to emphasise here because it’s so important.
At school, we learn about pathetic fallacy.
The teacher tells you to put rain at the beginning of your creative writing piece because it foreshadows the tragedy to come.
But that’s not life…
Life is, as Clark puts it so perfectly, the sun smiling ‘down on bloody killers’.
‘I am tempted to argue that what makes Shakespeare’s work superiors to Flaubert’s – however great – is what Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes as the “opacity of motive”. The theory is that the less we know about someone’s motive (such as Iago’s), or the greater the complexity of the motive (such as Hamlet’s), the greater the work of art.’
This is another piece of writing advice that turns traditional writing advice on its head.
We’re told the key to strong characters is motivation.
- What does the character want?
- What does the character need?
But what if you take away your character’s wants and needs?
Interestingly, Shakespeare adapted Othello from a tale written many years before him. The Iago in that story had a solid motivation. He felt jealousy and wanted Desdemona for himself.
But Shakespeare removed Iago’s motivation.
And hundreds of years later, we’re still trying to pick apart Iago as one of the most complex characters in the history of literature.
Dick move, Shakespeare. Dick move. But smart…
This review doesn’t even scratch the surface of The Art of X-Ray Reading
The book is a delightful, magical foray through some of the greatest works of literature ever penned.
The writing lessons are wonderful and will easily elevate your writing when applied.
I’d say this book is a must-read for any writer or lover of literature.
Check it out and let me know some of your favourite lessons.
