How to Read & Analyze

A writer is, before anything else, a reader. The clearer your reading, the clearer your writing. What follows is the analytic method I would have taught you for each genre.

How to Read a Short Story

Read Three Times

1. First reading — for the story. Just read. Don’t mark up. Note only the moment when you felt the story turn.
2. Second reading — for the structure. Mark the inciting incident, the rising scenes, the moment of pressure, the change, the closing image.
3. Third reading — for the sentence. Read one paragraph as if it were a poem. Where does rhythm change? Which sentence is longest, shortest, loudest?

Twelve Questions for Any Short Story

1. Whose story is this? Whose change does it record?
2. What does the protagonist want? Concrete, not abstract.
3. What stands in the way?
4. What is the inciting incident?
5. How does the story open? What promise does the first paragraph make?
6. How does the story end? What is the last image, and what does it carry?
7. Where is the moment of greatest pressure?
8. What changes in the protagonist?
9. What is the iceberg? What is left out that the writer clearly knows?
10. What is the point of view?
11. What is the prose doing? Long sentences? Short? Repetition?
12. What is this story about — at the third or fourth layer?

Things to Notice (That Beginning Readers Miss)

• Time. How much real time does the story cover?
• Numbers. Two beers, two anis, one anis. Three “fines.” Note the arithmetic.
• Objects. Objects in stories are never just objects.
• Names. Who is named, who is not, who is named only by relation.
• Repetitions. If something occurs twice in a short story, it is doing structural work.
• The title. Always.

How to Read a Poem

Read Aloud, Always

The first reading of a poem should be aloud. A poem is a piece of music as much as a piece of writing, and you cannot hear it until you have said it.

Read Four Times

1. Aloud, for sound. Hear the music.
2. Silently, for sense. What is the poem about at the simplest level?
3. Aloud, for structure. Mark line breaks, stanza breaks, volta, rhyme scheme.
4. Silently, for resonance. Look at the relations of the parts.

Twelve Questions for Any Poem

1. Who is speaking? What kind of person?
2. Who is being spoken to?
3. What is the occasion?
4. What is the central image?
5. How are the lines broken? Why there?
6. What is the form? Free verse? Sonnet? Villanelle?
7. Where is the volta — the turn?
8. What is repeated?
9. What is the diction? High, low, plain, formal?
10. Where does the rhythm fall?
11. What does the title do?
12. What does the last line carry?

The Six Tools of Poetic Analysis

1. Imagery. The sensory content.
2. Diction. The choice of words. Formal versus colloquial.
3. Syntax. The arrangement of words into sentences.
4. Sound. Rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, meter.
5. Form. Stanza shape, line length, white space.
6. Tone. The speaker’s attitude toward subject and reader.

How to Read a Memoir

Read for the Two Voices

The reader of a memoir is always listening for two voices. The voice of the person who lived through the events, and the voice of the person who is now telling about them. Mark, with two different colors of pen, the lines that belong to the lived self and the lines that belong to the telling self.

Twelve Questions for Any Memoir

1. What is the strand?
2. Whose voice is telling?
3. What is the “situation”?
4. What is the “story”?
5. What is the narrator’s relationship to the lived self?
6. What is the first sentence? What contract does it make?
7. Where is the testimony — the scene the writer cannot let go of?
8. What is undertold?
9. What is the cast?
10. What is the closing image?
11. What is the politics?
12. Do you trust the narrator? Why or why not?

How to Tell a True Memoir from a False One

• True memoir tells on itself. The narrator indicts themselves at least as often as they indict others.
• True memoir admits uncertainty.
• True memoir specifies. Brand names, weather, the smell of the car.
• True memoir does not diagnose. It shows.
• True memoir is humble about its own importance.

The Common Method

Beneath the differences between the genres there is a single reading practice. I call it close reading, but it is also just reading the way you would listen to a friend. Six steps.

1. Pay attention. Put the phone in another room.
2. Notice what you notice. The phrase that stopped you. The word that recurred.
3. Ask why. Trust that the writer chose it.
4. Compare with care. What is this text doing that other texts you’ve read are not?
5. Read for what is absent as well as what is present.
6. Carry the question outside the text. The best reading does not end on the page.