The kind of writer I like best is the one who has, at some point, been a critic. In the process of observing and analyzing literature, he came to the realization that he wanted to become a writer—stepping inside the literary arena and boldly stretching his wings, and voicing by any means, the dilemma of meaning in a passage in literature. In so doing, he learned to question, deconstruct story, and advance their writing.
I was taught how to read short stories, novels, and poems by a group of brilliant college professors at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida. As we read the literary works in class, they sought to find, or wanted students to find, something more specific, more educated and narrower than the words merely implied.
What is the meaning of this passage of literature? How is the plot holding up? Is the story threatening to collapse under its meaning? The professors wanted their Creative Writing students to appraise literature the same way a psychiatrist might study one of his patients, where he reviews, analyzes, and probes.
This way of reading can be called deconstructive. Simply put, this deconstruction assumes that stories, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrays them: they say one thing when they really mean something else. It's like walking into a crime scene and accessing the situation, only to find out later nothing was as it seemed.
When a book critic, or someone in a creative writing workshop, or even a fellow author complains, “I just couldn’t see what was really going on in the story,” or “I see that this issue matters to the writer, but she didn’t manage to make me feel that it was that poignant in the novel,” a different statement is also being made about the story.
The common implication here is that meaning is not clear. A novel in which the story has failed to be clear doesn’t deserve any success. A well-written story has a lot to say about its author. And as it relates to reading literature and evaluating it—in terms of craft and technique—it says a heck a lot more about the very people who created it.
To read only literary classics is not enough. A writer is at risk of becoming a cynical detective of the word, without advancing its own writing if they have a myopic view of the world around them. Each kind of reading, from classics to modern works in all genres—amidst the crazy evaluating and theorizing—is what every writer must do to learn through a series of close readings, what one writer says about and to another.
As this writerly critical tradition continues to flourish, both in and outside of classrooms, newsrooms, and academic arenas, a writer develops his own voice and style. Many writers have been shaped and influenced by formal literary studies. And many others have taken what they’ve learned and gone on to attend writing conferences and festivals to teach the importance of that long tradition of literary criticism by critiquing widely read literary and other types of works.
In a nutshell, this flow of critiquing, of deconstructive reading, allows writers to understand not only good writing but what other writers are trying to say in a world filled with so much unnecessary clutter and noise.
Keep on reading and . . . writing!
Maritza Cosano