Read like a thief

Reading only for pleasure is a fine life. Reading while you are trying to write is also a form of study, and study can be specific. Do not steal plots. Steal the moves: how a chapter ends on a question you can almost answer, how a joke is placed so the grief lands harder, how a description stops before it becomes a catalogue.

When a book does something you wish you could do, mark the page and write one plain sentence about the mechanism. Not 'beautiful', which you will not be able to use later. 'She withholds the brother's name until the argument needs it.' That sentence is a tool. Beauty is a result.

Read outside the shelf you are writing for, or you will inhale its clichés and call them the rules. A crime writer who also reads diaries, a literary novelist who also reads stage comedy, a screenwriter who reads narrative poems: the imports are what keep a voice from sounding like last year's category.

Beware the week of reading that replaces the week of writing. Books are easier company than your own unfinished ones, because someone else has already done the embarrassing part. Set a ratio you can bear — a chapter of theirs, then a page of yours — and keep it when the theirs is more fun.

The point of reading like a thief is to return to your own page with one move you did not have that morning. If you return only with the wish that you were the other writer, you have been window-shopping.