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Legal Writing

: Writing Tools

Develop X-Ray Reading Skills to Improve Your Writing

By Roy Peter Clark

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How do writers read?

I've come to believe that writers see things in texts that are invisible to others. Moreover, I have a theory that the best writers are the best readers, possessed with a kind of X-ray vision that allows them to peer through the surface of a text, to see the machinery whirring underneath.

The surface of the text -- and three or four levels beneath it -- reveals the author's intended meaning along with meanings derived from the reader's experience and imagination. That "crust" of the text may answer the question "what," but beneath it lies the answers to the question "how."

How did the writer capture my attention? How did she surprise me? How did he make that passage so clear and comprehensible?

So please help me with this modest experiment. I am about to share with you the first two paragraphs of a novel titled "Let the Great World Spin," by Colum McCann, winner of a National Book Award. That prize is an impressive enough credential. More impressive was the way the novel worked on my memory, my heart and my understanding of what it means to live in America.

In short, McCann's novel is a vision of New York City in the year 1974. It begins on August 7, the day that Philippe Petit walked on a tight wire from the top of one of the Twin Towers across the abyss to the other. That act, and what it meant to a group of diverse New Yorkers who witnessed it, is the anchor for an engaging and consoling narrative. The book stands on a tightrope, so to speak, in that treacherous place between commercial sentimentality and post-modern cynicism.

But how did he do it? Let's look at those first two paragraphs:

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke -- stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

"Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky."

I've put on my X-ray glasses to see what I can see in this passage, to try to figure out how it grabbed me by the throat and yanked me back into the New York City of my birth, the city I happened to leave for good in that same year, 1974. But this column is not about what I see in the text, but what you see.

Please spend a little time with those two paragraphs. See if you can answer the questions: Why and how does this passage work? Tackle as much of it as you'd like, but don't be afraid to focus on a single word, or even a mark of punctuation. It will be my pleasure to learn from your collective readings, and then to offer my own.

Share your reflections in the comments below, by e-mail or tweet. I'll respond with my answers to these questions in next week's column.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on February 03, 2010 (boomark / email).