![]() ![]() Doctors go to medical school, barristers train at the bar: novelists may or may not choose a creative writing course but reading is the one training tool they can't do without. Reading Like a Writer is a clarion call for aspiring writers to do that most simple, time-consuming but enjoyable thing: their homework. ![]() In such a bulging field, it is remarkable that there is any gap in the market, but an acerbic American novelist with the improbably suitable name of Francine Prose has found it and filled it. ![]() Most of what is on offer falls into three broad categories: works by academics seeking to treat the creative process with the same level of intellectual rigour given to other forms of analysis, such as David Lodge's The Art of Fiction write-your-bestseller books, such as Carole Blake's From Pitch to Publication and chirpy, exercise-based books full of practical anecdote for the newcomer: mea culpa. "S ooner or later some such book as this had to be written…" said Basil Hogarth in The Technique of Novel Writing, published in 1934 – possibly the first in what is now a Babel tower of creative writing manuals available to new writers. ![]()
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