In my years of editing, I’ve come to believe that reading is the single most important thing you can do to build your skills as a writer. If you’ve ever studied another language, you’ll know that you only start to reach fluency once you step away from the grammar lessons and vocabulary lists and start listening to the language out in the world. Writing works in just the same way. Craft books and courses are useful for learning the basics, but true mastery comes from absorbing great writing at the source. Reading the work of skilled writers will allow their structures—from plot moves to sentence rhythms—to sink into your brain, which will then intuitively refashion them for your own stories and words.

Any reading is valuable, whether you are lounging on a beach or sitting in a library with a pencil in hand to take notes, but in this post I’ll show you how you can supercharge your reading to get the most benefit from it. I’ve spent the last six months doing detailed breakdowns of popular novels and drawing out usable craft advice from them. Here I’ll give you the methods you can apply to novels in your genre to uncover the craft tools your favorite writers are using to make their magic.

Choose your books

You can use this reading strategy as a one-off exercise to apply to a novel you especially admire and want to learn from, but you can also make a broader plan that will give you an excellent grounding in your chosen genre. In that case, I’d recommend choosing several recent books (published within the last two or three years) in the genre or subgenre you are writing in, plus one or two in a very different kind of genre, preferably one that is unfamiliar to you. This analysis will work best if you use it on books you’ve already read once casually.

Buy a new paper notebook or create a new folder and files on your computer to collect your reading notes, your story spreadsheets, and your answers to the study and analysis questions.

Read and track

As you are reading each book, do two things:

First, fill out this story spreadsheet, which you’ll use when you are doing the analysis in the next step. You don’t need to fill in every column for every book, though it’s good to do so at least once. For books you’ve already read once, you’ll have a sense for which elements are important to track and you might come up with your own categories.

Second, highlight and/or take notes on anything that jumps out at you as you read. This might be an especially beautiful sentence or a plot surprise or a scene you want to come back and analyze in greater detail. If you are reading on paper, you can take notes right on the book (think of these as your study textbooks!) or you can use sticky notes and tabs or copy material and observations into a notebook or computer file. If you are reading an ebook, you can use your app or device’s highlighting and note feature. Take the time to export your notes at the end and save them on your computer. (Pro tip: if you use the Kindle or Books app on an iPad, you can highlight different elements in different colors.)

Study and analyze

After you are finished with your reread, gather your story spreadsheet and your notes and work your way through the following questions at a time when your brain is fresh. Try to answer all of them for your first few books. After that, you can zero in on the questions that seem most relevant to your current book.

(1) Before you dive into your analysis, write down the top three things you love about this novel: What made you want to read it again? What made it a satisfying and immersive reading experience? Come back to these answers at the end of your analysis and see if you can translate the things you loved to concrete craft choices the novelist made.

(2) Take a look at the cover and any other front matter, like an epigraph or illustration. What signals do they send? What mood do they convey? How is the title related to the content or themes of the book? What attracted you to the cover or title of this book when you first picked it up? Example analysis: The City We Became

(3) How does the opening work? List the first 10 things (big or little, emotional or physical) you learn about the protagonist. Why did the novelist choose these details? Example analyses: The Dutch House, The Searcher, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

(4) How does the writer handle backstory in the novel? Are there past events that provide the key to understanding the protagonist’s motivations and choices? If so, how do you learn about these events? Where does the novelist provide hints about these events and where do they do a deeper dive or flashback? Example analysis: The Searcher

(5) Without looking at the novel, list the first ten details or words that come to mind when you think about the novel’s setting. Now reread the first three chapters and list the setting details that jump out at you. Are there specific details that conjure up a larger world? Do any of these details echo larger themes in the novel? Example analyses: Matrix, The Searcher

(6) What are the key moments in the protagonist’s character arc? Is there an inciting incident that gets the action going? Is there an all-is-lost moment where it seems the protagonist is going to fail to achieve their goal? Where are those moments placed in the novel? Example analyses: The Last Thing He Told Me, The Searcher

(7) Categorize each scene on your story spreadsheet according to intensity and identify key plot points or structural elements like part breaks. Compare the visual structure of the book you produce to the experience of reading it. Where does the author place the most intense scenes? How does the novel’s plot structure compare to plot templates or beat sheets you are familiar with?

(8) If you’ve tracked open and closed story questions (and/or, for a mystery, clues and red herrings) on your story spreadsheet, note the rhythms and patterns the novelist uses. What’s the relationship between closed questions and open ones? Are there story questions that are never closed? How did the rhythm of open and closed questions impact your reading experience? Example analyses: The Last Thing He Told Me, The Searcher

(9) Pick at least one scene and categorize every sentence, using these categories: action, summary, dialogue, character description, setting, introspection, and backstory. What do you see? Which parts of the scene feel fast and which feel slow? Which elements are used to convey the purpose of the scene or the deeper themes? Which elements would you consider showing and which would you consider telling? Are there any of these elements you feel you need to use more or less in your own current manuscript? Example analysis: The Dutch House

(10) What kind of narration does the novel use? Are there multiple point-of-view characters or just one? (A point-of-view character is one whose internal thoughts and feelings we have access to.) Does the novelist use third-person (he/she) or first-person (I) narration? Is the narration in past tense (she said) or present tense (she says)? How do these choices affect the way you experience the story? Pick a different POV option and rewrite at least a paragraph and perhaps even a full scene in that alternate POV. (For example, go from third-person past tense to first-person present or narrate the scene from the POV of a different character.) How would that alternate POV choice change your experience of the story? Example analysis: The City We Became

(11) Is the story told in chronological order? If not, where are the time jumps located? How would reading the story in chronological order affect the way you experience it? How does the writer signal that they are moving backwards or forwards in time? Example analysis: The Dutch House

(12) Pick a scene with a lot of dialogue. How does the novelist differentiate the voices of different characters? If they use dialect or non-English languages, which kinds of words do they choose to change? How does the author use dialogue tags and action tags [link]? How do they weave setting details, action, and interior thoughts, feelings, and memories into dialogue? What subtext is happening in this scene? (In other words, what are the characters not saying out loud and why not?) Example analyses: I Kissed Shara Wheeler, The Searcher

(13) If there is a film or TV version of the novel, watch that and take notes on the differences. Find a scene that is similar in both media and reread the novel version again, noting especially how the novelist uses interiority (thoughts, feelings, memories, internal reactions) and how that is translated to the visual version.

(14) How is this novel related to other novels in the genre? Are there any elements that make it stand out? Does it use familiar tropes in the genre and, if so, how does the novelist put their own twist on that trope?

(15) What have you learned from this analysis that you can apply to your own work? Review your answer to question 1. Is there a specific technique you want to try?