The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0316282170
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts.
Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In THE ART OF X-RAY READING, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.
screenplay. When an unfinished novel of Hemingway’s came out in 1998, Didion wrote about it in The New Yorker magazine. It was a dazzling essay that began with the excerpt from Hemingway quoted above. What follows is her remarkable X-ray reading of the text, not from the perspective of a critic or scholar but that of a fellow writer. She is clearly looking deep beneath the surface of the text, and she does it in a single long paragraph: That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears
come. In the first paragraph we are introduced to the grandmother’s son, Bailey, described as “her only boy.” This sounds innocent enough but is the kind of thing we say when a mother loses her child to an accident or violence. “The real tragedy is she lost her only boy.” Grandma doesn’t want to go to Florida because she prefers “to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee,” but she makes up an excuse by exaggerating the danger of an escaped criminal, news she learns from that day’s
joke. Don’t be afraid to mix the comic and the tragic. 2. As you imagine the arc of a story, think of the middle as a place where all seems lost, but also as a place from which important characters and values can be restored. The middles of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, never get the attention they deserve, elbowed out of the picture by their more beautiful siblings: beginnings and endings. 3. I’ve harped on the power of a single word at the end of a passage. It’s powerful at the end of
soon as his wish is granted, his beloved daughter turns to metal upon his touch. In nonfiction, we see the narrative wish played out as a condition of human aspiration. A wish to become an Olympic champion turns into an illegal effort with performance-enhancing drugs. The student gets into the school of her dreams but resorts to cheating when she can’t achieve good grades. So back to King Arthur, who wants to see something truly magical. Be careful, Arthur, what you wish for. Just as Arthur
a state of war This is the most famous sentence written by Hobbes in his most famous book. He writes a generation after Shakespeare, and there is that rhythm and weight we hear so often in passages from the King James Bible. The key word in the passage is its shortest: no. For the record, it appears ten times in a sentence of only ninety-two words. War, whatever the stated intentions of those who wage it, is nihilistic, a negation of the human. That word, no, connects the elements of the first