How to read a page

For someone dealing with writer’s block and learning to write fiction, most writing advice can be maddening. The advice tends to focus on how to write a story, or how to structure a whole story. Often though, the blocked writer isn’t trying to write a story – they’re just trying to write a single page.

That’s why I study passages. Given a page of text, how does the author move the story forward?

• State: What story elements is the author introducing? Do they start at a high level of abstraction versus high specificity? Are there patterns to how these elements are arranged on the page?
• Change: How does state change? Are elements interacting physically, being shaped by choices, or is someone’s understanding of the situation changing?
• Time: How does the author move the story through the past, present, and future? How compressed or static is time? Is time continuous, somewhat vague, or does it jump?
• Frame: How is the perspective being framed? At what level of objectivity or subjectivity is the passage operating? Is it a simple or complex perspective?

I start at a high level, describing the passage in a few sentences. For example, here is my summary of page four from Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Monarch butterflies are introduced as a metaphor for the war trauma felt by the narrator’s mother. He then describes a scene where he first encountered that trauma as he frightens his mother while dressed as a soldier, making her cry.

Then I look in more detail while simultaneously stripping away specific semantic information. If a passage starts with a description of the autumn migration of Monarch butterflies as they pass through Michigan, I reduce that to the author describes a recurring event in a specific time and place.

I can then change the semantic elements of the story.

Instead of the annual migration of butterflies, I can apply the same pattern to the monthly influx of welfare checks into a poor neighborhood, or the daily ringing of the bell at school that dismisses the last class and sends children out to their lockers.

I can also think about other ways the same story elements could have been rearranged or changed.

What if the passage started with the boy frightening his mother, then he runs outside and scatters the Monarch butterflies, and then the butterfly migration is explained? Instead of being a helpless boy confronting his mother’s trauma, it would assign a greater sense of agency to the boy, almost as if he is affecting the butterfly migration or causing his mother’s pain.

Eventually, I can start to compare this passage to other passages. How does this recurring event, for example, compare to the freak storm that opens Tove Jansson’s, The True Deceiver?

An analysis like this takes a bit of time, certainly more time than just reading for leisure. But there comes a certain point if I want to be serious about what I do, I have to be willing to spoil a bit of the pleasure.

But honestly, there’s an even more intense form of pleasure to be found when I start to understand some of the choices an author has made. It starts to feel like I’m sitting next to the writer and watching them work.

Ah, I see what you did there. That was clever.