I’ve always believed that we can only ingest so many words from other people until we’re compelled to spill some back out. Long before we understand plot arcs, character construction, or theme, most of us fall first in love with reading. For me, reading in childhood began as an escape from a frantic, stressful family home. Then I fell in love with stories for their own sakes. 

At some point, reading changed for me. I realized that I have stories to tell, too, and I began noticing what other writers were doing to make their stories stand out from the crowd. In time, I began reading like a writer, and that shift opened an entirely new way of reading for me. 

Whenever someone tells me that they’re a writer, one of the first questions I ask is, “What do you like to read?” Many have an answer, but there are those who shuffle their feet while avoiding eye contact. The truth is, if you don’t like reading, then writing is probably not for you. Stephen King said, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” And that’s the truth. 

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned about how to read with a writer’s eye. These are lessons that have shaped my writing life more than any formal training, which to be honest, is virtually nil. I don’t have an MFA (I have an MA in English literature, not an MFA in creative writing). I took one creative writing course at university, hated it, and never took another. That’s it. I’m completely self-taught, and I taught myself by reading helpful how-to guides and studying some of the best writers out there. 

Examine Your Favorite Writers

I decided to write novels after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I wanted to do what Dickens did, which was create entire worlds unto themselves. I’m not quite sure I’ve achieved that lofty goal, but I’ve learned so much about writing from studying my favorite authors. 

When I was a new, fresh-faced writer, I would spend hours copying out passages from my favorite authors (Dickens, Morrison, and one poet–Walt Whitman) into a spiral notebook just to get a feel for their language and how they crafted words onto the page. I began spotting each author’s favorite techniques, such as Dickens’s orchestral layering of character entrances, Morrison’s ability to make memory feel physical, and Whitman’s way of turning the ordinary inside out. These recurring choices become a creative fingerprint, and noticing them teaches you to identify your own unique patterns. What styles do you return to again and again? What literary elements do you admire in others that you might experiment with yourself?

Writing Lives in the Details

It’s all in the details, right? Only details are never just details. Details that seem minor in the moment such as a weathered photograph, an unfinished letter, or a character’s nervous habit can become anchors for your story. The more emotionally true your story is, the more readers will believe in the people and the world you created. 

Pay close attention to which details authors choose to share, and even more importantly, why they chose them. When I’m teaching literature, I tell my students that great writers don’t make random choices. Every single thing is in the story for a reason. Every single thing has a purpose. When you’re writing, do the same. Don’t add things just for the sake of adding them. What is their purpose? As the author, you should know. When you’re reading like a writer, you might look for the specific details that bring a scene to life or how characters are slowly revealed. 

Structure is Necessary

Most of us don’t notice structure until it goes wrong and topples over. When a story is structured correctly, it feels natural, as if it couldn’t be any other way. All stories have a basic structure, a beginning, middle, and end. There’s a lot of room to play in that basic structure, but you still need that basic structure. It goes along the lines of you need to know the rules to break them. A slow beginning might work if readers feel the build-up will pay off later, but you still need to capture readers’ attention fairly quickly. Many stories suffer from soggy middles, where the pieces no longer feel connected, as if the author lost the plot, literally, somewhere along the way. Check your favorite novels to see how the author constructs the movement of the story. Where are the slower moments compared to the action that moves the plot forward? 

Once you start noticing structural choices, you understand how to use structure in your own writing. You understand why climaxes fall where they do, how flashbacks can be used to create tension, and why some stories unfold slowly while others sprint. Don’t forget that structure is not a rigid formula but a flexible framework. I’ve written 14 novels, and each time, I have to find the structure that works for that particular story. 

Great Dialogue Isn’t Realistic 

When I first started writing, I thought of becoming a screenwriter. It didn’t take long for me to switch to fiction, but a lot of the tips I learned about writing dialogue in screenwriting apply to novels as well. When I was the executive editor of The Copperfield Review, one sure thing to turn me off from publishing a story was stilted dialogue that sounded forced. Difficult dialogue makes the whole story difficult to read.

One of the main tricks to dialogue is to remember that it isn’t supposed to mimic real conversation. You know how we um and ah as we speak. Yeah, that shouldn’t be in your dialogue unless it has a specific reason for being there. Dialogue is not realistic in the literal sense. It’s realistic in an emotional sense. Jane Austen was a master of dialogue. So was Ray Bradbury. Who do you think does dialogue well? Read their fictional conversations carefully to see how they construct the words their characters say. 

One trick I use from my screenwriting days is to make sure that every conversation between characters moves the plot forward in some way. The dialogue isn’t there simply to take up space. Even if the reason for the conversation isn’t clear in the moment, ultimately readers are learning something they’re going to need to know later. 

Everything You Read Can Be a Lesson

Learning what not to do can be as important as what to do. Books that I would give one or two stars might have pacing that drags, which teaches me how to tighten my scenes. When I read flat characters I’m reminded that characters should be multi-dimensional. A confusing subplot reminds me of the importance of clarity. When I edited Copperfield for 23 years, I read thousands of short stories and they helped me see what works and what doesn’t in a story. I learned more from that experience than I could have learned in any MFA program. 

Reading like a writer is not a passive act but a conversation between the reader and the book. Active engagement turns reading into a creative partnership. If you want to understand your voice, your themes, your instincts, why you write the way you do, then look at your bookshelf and your favorite books. The stories that you return to over and over again are trying to teach you something.

Reading like a writer means examining the books you love for lessons about how to write. I wrote about this in a little more depth in Painting the Past: A Guide for Writing Historical Fiction. Reading like a writer improves my craft more than anything else. It teaches me to pay attention to the details and the conversations. Stories are the result of thousands of tiny choices made by authors who care deeply about what they want to say. Be an author who cares. What do you want to say? How are you going to say it?