How does learning to read like a writer shape and improve one’s craft?
To a reader, there’s often a sense of inevitability about a finished book, whereas writers understand that every finished piece of fiction has been made up of hundreds or thousands of choices by the author and that changing any one of them might have made for a different story entirely. Learning to read as a writer means questioning why the author made this particular set of choices. How would the book be different if the author killed off that character in chapter 3 or 9 instead of 5? What if the character was an accountant instead of a hairdresser? If it was in 1st person instead of 3rd? Present tense instead of past?
Learning to read and think about books in this way helps writers gain confidence in using different techniques in their own work. It also encourages a view of writing as experimentation and discovery. That there are as many ‘correct’ ways to write a book as there are books can be a truly liberating and generative realisation.
How do you balance reading for ‘homework’ and reading for pleasure? Are you able to switch off your writer brain when reading?
My primary purpose for reading is still, always pleasure, and paying attention to craft is part of the enjoyment for me. Absolute best case scenario, though, is that something is so brilliant that I read it in a kind of fog of delight and only when I’m finished do I realise I have no idea how the writer just did that to me. It’s the greatest thrill because it means I’ve had an incredible experience as a reader and that I have a brilliant new text from which to learn as a writer.
Is reading to write the same thing as researching? Do you take notes when reading to inform your writing?
I don’t think of them as the same. Research, for me, is about gathering information to inform, enlarge, complicate or thicken the world on the page. Reading for writing is all about craft: how has the writer taken whatever information forms the content of the story and made it into this book specifically? And I take notes constantly. My notebooks full of observations, ideas, quotes, and questions are my first resort when feeling stuck.
What books are currently on your bed side table?
I’m reading Audition by Katie Kitamura which is every bit as entrancing and discomforting as I’ve come to expect from Kitamura. I’m also in the midst of a year-long slow read of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. I sped through them the first time (despite their considerable heft) and this re-read is revealing layers upon layers in the narrative as well as providing me with regular bursts of joy at just how good Mantel is on the sentence level.
Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books, and an experienced teacher and mentor of emerging writers. Her novels have been translated into 12 languages and her articles, essays and reviews have been published widely. Emily was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Her latest book is the novel Rapture.
Find her website at emilymaguire.com.au
Join Emily Maguire for her course, Reading to Write, Saturday 6 September 2025, 10am-4pm.
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