You can teach writing by teaching reading. With that sound philosophy, writing coach Roy Peter Clark, author of such books as Writing Tools and How to Write Short, gives us The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing (2016).Those "25 great works of literature" (actually a few more than 25) are a varied lot, everything from Shakespeare's sonnets and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to a cookbook by M.F.K. Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf). The authors are as distant as Chaucer and as recent as Donna Tartt. In each case Clark uncovers writing lessons that other writers can learn from, whether they include professional authors and journalists or students just trying to write better term papers.
Clark advises taking it slow when we read great books, analyzing each word, each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph, reading it over and over again until you discover what makes it work, what makes it great and what it really means. Why did Shakespeare write, "The queen, my lord, is dead" rather than "The queen is dead, my lord" or "My lord, the queen is dead"? What makes Shakespeare's choice the best one? That's the kind of stuff Clark gets into, yet without ever boring his readers. Clark's own writing, in fact, is worth studying.
A good book, Clark says, is "a perpetual motion machine. It "drives a story and lets the reader feel the energy." That energy will be there each time one opens that book and, if the book is really good, it will still be there hundreds of years from now when anyone reads the same words. The Art of X-Ray Reading demonstrates why this is so.
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