## Metadata - Author: [[Francine Prose]] - Full Title: Reading Like a Writer - Category: #books ## Highlights - To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read another writer whose work is entirely different from the first, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art. ([Location 161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000JMKSWE&location=161)) - the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. ([Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000JMKSWE&location=382)) - What’s in store for us is not a straightforward examination, a glorified statistical analysis of the inexplicable infrequency of illness as a literary subject, but rather an opportunity to watch Woolf’s mind skipping from subject to subject in a simultaneously imaginative and logical way, crossing gossamer bridges that never seem like non sequiturs but rather like stepping stones from one clear stream of thought to another, from one engaging observation to the next. ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000JMKSWE&location=666))