Roy Peter Clark shows how to dissect a great piece of writing

Start asking writers for writing advice and you won’t get far without hearing something like “read a lot. A lot!”

William Faulkner was asked what the best training was for a writer: “Read, read, read,” he said. “Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing.”

Reading is the easy part. The tricky part is in the middle of that quote: “See how they do it.” Pulling useful information about writing from something you’re reading is a skill itself, one that must be learned and practiced.

One of my favorite people in the writing-advice racket is Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, and he showed how it’s done in a post on Poynter.org last week. In The ‘cinematic slow-motion effect’ of Laura Hillenbrand’s ‘Seabiscuit,’ Clark examines two climactic paragraphs from Hillenbrand’s classic book, her description of the stretch run of the 1940 Santa Anita Derby.

Clark picks apart Hillenbrand’s use of a writer’s tools, especially punctuation but also sentence length and even italics, to create motion, speed up and slow down the action and create mood:

Consider all the tools of language used–and not used–to create this startling, cinematic slow-motion effect. Not used, for example, are commas to break up what might look like a run-on sentence: “Seabiscuit reached and pushed and Pollard folded and unfolded over his shoulders and they breathed together.”

Clark suggests that Hillenbrand left commas out of that sentence not because the clauses are short enough that the sentence is easy to understand without them, but for a more literary reason: “The sentence describes a continuous flowing action of horse and jockey: first horse, then jockey, then both together. The action, if you will, is running on. And so is the sentence.”

Have you ever looked closely at a great piece of writing and had a light bulb go off? Ever taken that lesson into your own writing? Tell us about it in the comments.

Follow-up: How Dave Barry used booger jokes to teach me how to write