How Your Reading Changes When You Write and Teach

How we identify in our personal, professional, and social lives affects what we read and how we read it. I began reading as a kid looking for escape; trying to fit myself in the world of other characters and relate their stories to my own. But we evolve as readers, challenged by the demands of school, or questioned by our friends. (The Reading Lives podcast examines this evolution as Jeff asks different writers about their reading habits.) I found myself getting in trouble in elementary school because I secretly read books I found interesting while I was supposed to be reading the boring stories from our textbook. In high school, I pushed myself to go to the library and find “fun” books that I didn’t have to analyze. But the most significant changes happened for me in college and in my career. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the way I read now has significantly changed because of these new reader-identities I have as a writer and a teacher. Though a lot of writers are also teachers, there are specific ways we are taught to approach books for these jobs; different goals we have in mind as readers. I wanted to examine what these differences are for me.

It was common in my MFA program to joke about how studying writing took the joy out of pleasure reading. As professional writers, we needed to understand the intricacies of how prose worked. We needed to track the build of a good story sentence by sentence, word by word. Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer became a guiding text for how to analyze a novel to better our own work. With chapters like “Close Reading,” “Sentences,” and “Paragraphs,” Prose challenges the writer to dig into each constructive element of writing, and ask how every single part of a narrative can influence the effect on the reader. I read voraciously during my master’s program, but it’s often hard to remember the overall story of the novels I read. Instead, what sticks are the details: word choice, metaphor, character details. I was taught to read with a pencil in hand, and although most engaged readers already do this to note good passages, I find myself annotating so much I almost have my own narrative in the margins. With “Writer” as part of my reader-identity, I became a reader that questioned the novelist at every turn. Reading was a conversation, sometimes even a debate, of essential truths.

When my reader-identity shifted to a teacher, my chosen career, I became a devout believer in fiction. I was a warrior fighting in defense of the writer’s work and its importance. As a teacher, I believed in every shift, word choice, metaphor, and character arc. It became my job to trust the story and look for the clues that illuminated the narrative path. Now I had to approach each work with different questions. Would students connect with the characters? What themes could we analyze as a class? What did each symbol really mean?