Reading Like a Writer

Matthew Salesses's Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a novel about doubling and disappearing. It's funny and frightening and sad. It's also very much interested in what is real and what is imagined, what is said out loud and what is merely thought.

Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is about two families who are thrown together as the world is ending. The precise nature of the disaster is never revealed; we only know it's bad. I want to talk about how the particular style of narration works to unsettle the reader.

Trail of Lightning is set in the time after the Big Water, a climate catastrophe that has drowned most of the continent. It’s a world “where the old gods have risen, where monsters threaten the five-fingereds, where death stalks the few who still live on the land of their ancestors.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things is about Atl, a vampire on the run in Mexico City, and Domingo, a teenager who lives on the streets and decides to help her. I’m interested in the way Atl is described, how the sequence of the details creates a dynamic—and magical—understanding of her.

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is the story of a woman crossing the border from Mexico to the United States in search of her brother. The novel is a study in unsettling the reader to create an experience that is frightening, beautiful, and astounding.

Megha Majumdar’s A Burning is about a young Muslim woman in India who witnesses a terrorist attack and then makes a reckless post on Facebook. She is accused of being a terrorist and ultimately pays a terrible price. I'm interested in how Majumdar handles that price.

Warning: Spoilers in this post.

There’s a lot of talk about starting books off at exciting moments, right in the middle of things. And there are many great reasons to do this. There are also a lot of challenges! How do we cram in the backstory and character building needed to fully understand the scene?

We Love You, Charlie Freeman is about a Black family who agrees to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. The story follows teenage Charlotte and her family during the time of the linguistic experiment as well as older stories relating to the institute running the experiment and its racist history.

Brit Bennett’s The Mothers starts with a 17-year-old girl whose mother has just died by suicide and spirals from there, following not just her, but the other lives that hers touches. I want to talk about its fascinating style of narration.

I’m not reading as much as I did pre-isolation. It’s harder to focus, and with a kid at home, there is very little time. But I can manage a bit of TV—which is just as good for finding writing techniques and strategies. I promise.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee, is a novel that spans generations—an incredibly difficult thing to do! 

I’d like to talk about how the style of narration and the careful way it is filtered through various characters helps Lee to a create story that moves through long periods of time with elegance.

Sometimes, as writers, we need to show a shift in atmosphere or mood—but how to describe that? A great technique is to describe the same unchanging thing but in a different way. I think of it as a shift in the sensibility of the character as they respond to the change in the air.