Reading with Purpose
By Victoria Fortune
One of the many benefits of joining an MFA program is that reading is now homework. No longer do I feel guilty about tucking myself away to read for a couple of hours, leaving dishes piled in the sink or the laundry bin full of dirty clothes. I’m working, I tell myself. Of course, the flip side is that reading is work, not just pleasure.
As part of this semester’s work in my low-residency program, my mentor and I came up with a reading list of 10 books based on my goals: part research of the historical event I’m writing about, part study of dialect and elements of historical fiction. In addition to producing about twenty pages of new material each month, I am also responsible for turning in annotations on two or three books from my list.
It was natural taking notes on the nonfiction works that I was mining for historical details, but I labored over my first annotations on novels, turning in essays of literary analysis like those I wrote for literature courses in college. My mentor quickly redirected me, pointing out that these annotations were not meant to critique the work as a whole, but rather to focus on what I gleaned from the books to apply in my own writing.
This brought me back to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, which I read years ago, when I first started taking writing classes. It’s a book to be revisited again and again, and well worth buying just for the reading list in the back if nothing else, although I will admit I found the title, “Books to Be Read Immediately,” daunting, considering it’s a five-page list that includes tomes such as War and Peace and Middlemarch.
Reading Like a Writer offers excellent insight into making your reading more purposeful. Each chapter addresses a different element of fiction and offers advice for examining that element in your reading, with plenty of rich examples from a wide spectrum of literature. If I were the self-disciplined type who could create assignments for myself and follow through on them, I might have been able to fashion a DIY MFA just using this book.
Alas, I am not that type. I need external accountability, which is why I applied to an MFA program. I also tend to be impatient. When something I read inspires an idea for my fiction, I want to dive right into the story, but then it’s easy to lose track of my intention. When I write annotations, I am more likely to remember the gist of them, even without review, and I have them to look back at when I get stuck and need inspiration to get going again.
Most importantly, writing annotations reinforces the habits of mind any writer needs to have when reading:
•It compels me to think ahead of time about my purpose and ask questions as I read. (Why am I reading this? What do I need to focus on?)
• It trains my attention on the choices the author makes (structure, details, dialogue, the introduction and unfolding of characters and plot points, etc.).
• It forces me to slow down, think deeply, and flesh out my thoughts more thoroughly.
On the other hand, note taking can be distracting if it detracts from the flow of the story. I tend to underline and make margin notes and only add to my annotations when I am ready to stop reading. Then, when I finish the book, I go back through my annotations, look for recurring ideas or patterns, and reflect on what stood out to me as I read and how I could apply it in my own writing.
A plethora of websites offer advice for note taking. Most are focused on taking notes from academic texts, but this one includes some good tips that can be applied to novels and narrative nonfiction as well. It pays to take notes, if you have the patience.
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