For short stories, I used to re-write stories I liked, line by line. I don't mean re-type, I mean write down the first line and think about why the next line must inevitably come next and why it could have been different.

Writing well is all about making conscious choices and trying to put oneself into the mind of the author, trying to understand why a particular story had to be told in that way can be extremely instructive.

Then, I would consider how I would write that story and think about why I would approach it from a certain perspective and how my own experiences would shape it.

It's pretty similar with poems, except focusing on music, image, line breaks and movement (including wordplay).

I look at a couple of things.

I usually read through something first without any sort of 'analytical strategy'. I pick up on things here and there that I like (from a stylistic or technical standpoint) but mainly I just read as a reader and see how it makes me feel.

Afterwards when I'm reflecting on what I just read or believe the work is worth taking another look at, there are a few very important factors I try to dig deeper into.

1: First one is voice. How is the author communicating? Is it through a first-person, stream of consciousness style? Third person omniscient? This is a pretty broad term that I also lump 'style' into. From there I ask what was the author doing specifically with his/her voice that was working for me? For example you might really like the authenticity of a first-person stream of consciousness novel you just read. Examining why voice is effective is both a matter of technical breakdown as well as appropriate slang usage, timing, and cadence. When I'm editing or critiquing someone else's work, voice is usually the first thing I look for. It's the most important, in my eyes at least.

2: Second one is character, and this is an obvious one. What about the characters made them interesting? What made me root for them? What made me hate or fear them? What made them believable? What were each character's motivations? From a writer's perspective I also look closely at verbal tics used by the author as well as inflection and tone each character uses frequently. Convincing dialogue gets me off.

3: Thirdly I examine the work thematically. This is a hugely important aspect to any affecting piece of narrative and one that stretches broadly over the course of a work, rather than something that can be picked up on immediately. For example in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (one of my personal favorites) a big theme in the story is identity. Who are we, really? How do we perceive others? What does it mean to have an identity? How easily can your identity be changed? If a work makes you ask questions and is reflected in the settings, characters, and voice, you know that the themes are strong. The more layered the themes are, the more complex a work usually is.

4: Plot is also something I look at, as (in my opinion) it can be the most difficult part to get just right. How do the events in the work move from one to another? How do they relate? Am I interested in the events happening, and am I invested in the outcome? Two sticking points for me as a writer are the beginning and the end. Does the beginning grab you? And does the ending satisfy?

This is a really broad topic and there's a lot to discuss here, but these are just a few of the elements I look for when dissecting a literary work with the intention of becoming a better writer. From there I usually try emulating writers that I admire on my own and see what about their style works for me and what doesn't. Then, after a bunch of reading, and millions of words written, you can start to find your own voice and try to put together a story with all of these lovely little elements.

1. re writing

onehunna said

Then, after a bunch of reading, and millions of words written, you can start to find your own voice and try to put together a story with all of these lovely little elements.

2. re reading other writers

When a tale captures my attention and imagination, I try to identify what made it so magical. For example, kleinbl00's recent story was great. In my comment I only focussed on why the last line appealed to me. Another thing I liked is that while the theme is large: humanity's love of ritual and the ease of creating a belief system out of absolutely nothing, the details are on a small human personal scale.

That is what I want to do in a story and what I want a story to do.

forwardslash - thx

One of my first comments here on hubski was a pretty naked expression of my reading process. I'm not sure how effective that comment is... in retrospect, the analysis seems more revealing of my experience as a (certainly flawed) reader with the poem than the actual poem itself, but I think that's the point I want to make --

Have you ever heard of Death of the Author? It's an idea that goes so, the intentions of the author should not influence a reading because you end up limiting possible interpretations of the text, and we can never really know the intentions anyways... All we have is the arrangement of words, and how our brains spark in its processing. And in this sense, we cannot ever reverse engineer writing. We can only express our own experiences with it.

Or rather, reading IS reverse engineering but you can't get away from the you. It seems to me that the best way to read is as a practice of mindfulness. Eyes on the text and ears pressed against the self.

It's unclear whether you're discussing fiction or nonfiction, and the two are very different beasts. But I'd argue that there are two problems to resolve when putting together a piece meant to be read by an audience.

The first is structure. That is, how do you want to organize the information presented? In fiction that's typically done with scenes, in nonfiction organization can be temporal for a series of events or by commonality. Regardless, you face the problem that readers take the message in as a stream; word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and so on. But complex ideas are typically nonlinear. So you must associate these disparate ideas through the sieve of a linear filter; a brain.

With fiction, you might use repetition to built motif and theme. Or structure scenes in a nonlinear timeline in order to form cross associations that might be missed with a linear time flow. Occasionally you'll even see cyclic structure, such as O'Brien used in _The Things They Carried._ But usually the structure is that of a linear time flow with a ladder of success / failure / success / failure as your protagonist works to achieve his/her goal.

Nonfiction can be temporal, often used with historical texts. Or structured around a theme that's broken down by subsections; often used in academic writing where citations are a framework for an argument. Journalistic writing tends to focus on the most important facts first and build like a pyramid, so editors can cull the least relevant material to fit into a page slot.

For fiction, a serious issue to resolve is characterization. What are your character's motivations? What do they want to get or accomplish? What are they sensing within a scene during story time? How do events in the story make them feel emotionally? And there's the issue of voicing. How do they speak? What mannerisms make them distinct and different from other characters, so they stand out as an individual?

The second problem, for both fiction and nonfiction, is the issue of presentation. That's typically the last problem to resolve, and is handled at final draft stage through a series of copyedits with your best friend Mr. Thesaurus. You'll dig around, sentence by sentence, looking for just the right word that either removes ambiguity or - sometimes - introduces intentional ambiguity for artistic purposes. This is the point where your main focus is to make prose flow as readable as possible. It's the last step, because you don't want to worry about this stuff while you're shifting scenes, moving paragraphs, adding quotes and introducing new citations.

As for analyses, yeah. Do it. Tear apart your favorite author's work and try to copy it stylistically. It helps.

So I don't know how helpful I can be because a "source code" approach is pretty alien to me. I'm a methodical person in pretty much everything I do but writing is, in my opinion, not something you can do paint-by-number.

Writing is communication above all. It's a connection from one soul to another. For me, that means I need to figure out how to get what's in my soul into yours - and I can only guess at the path I need to take. Reading someone else's writing shows me the approaches they take, but it doesn't inform me as to why, it doesn't inform me as to what they thought would work and what wouldn't, what they put up as their primary attack and what was a hail-mary play. If it reaches me, it's above and beyond the words and if it doesn't, I only see the clumsiness.

Even then, we're talking about my reaction to the writing, and I am just one person. My take isn't what matters. Here's the first paragraph of George R Stewart's Earth Abides, one of my favorite books:

Just as he pulled himself up to the rock ledge, he heard a sudden rattle, and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand; turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a large one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his lips and sucked hard at the base of the index finger, where a little drop of blood was oozing out. "*Don't waste time by killing the snake!*" he remembered.

Not brilliant, not exceptional, but involving. It puts you there. Considering it's a book about the 70 years of civilization following a global pandemic that eliminates 99.999% of the human population, starting with a rattlesnake bite puts you in the seat, as it were. Now compare to the first paragraph of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons -

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own. he stared up in terror at the dark figure looming over him. 'What do you want!"

"*La chiave*", the raspy voice replied. "The password."

"But… I don't-"

The intruder pressed down again, grinding the white hot object deeper into Vetra's chest. There was the hiss of broiling flesh.

I mean, that's right up there with "twas a dark and stormy night." Who's sold more books, though? So... who has connected better?

In the end, I just let myself be moved by things that are moving, and I draw inspiration from what others are communicating to me, without ever having me in mind, without ever knowing I exist, but taking it on faith that someone out there wants to hear what they have to say.

And that's really about as deep as I go.

I don't think I consciously pick apart writing I enjoy or am interested in in the same way you would a website or app. I tend to notice some things naturally, like how I would write about the piece, and other things I just tend to know - like whether i enjoy the writing style or not.

I do find myself picking up elements from other writers I really enjoy or am reading a lot, though that's mostly not a conscious thing, either. For example, about a year ago, my writing went very Prachett-like for about a week. A few years back, when I started reading Bukowski, my poetry went from long, ode-like works to really short, free-form Bukowskian works in the space of a few days (though that one was a bit more intentional).

I think it's really just what I'm interested in and enjoying that finds its way into my work.

I find analyzing text by Theme and Rheme to be especially useful for technical writing.