“No one is born,” writes poetry critic Helen Vendler, “understanding string quartets or reading Latin or creating poems; without the scholar and his libraries, there would be no perpetuation and transmission of culture.” I assume (or at least hope) that Vendler’s “scholar” is a large enough umbrella term to include the role of educator, since information doesn’t do much without some form of teacher to organize it, interpret it, present it, and demonstrate how to incorporate it into future efforts. Even for those who believe strictly in preternatural talent, there still must be a process of how one becomes what one is.

The premise of Roy Peter Clark’s The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing is that anyone pursuing a creative field should study its history—both narrative and aesthetic—in order to establish a foundation on which to build a unique voice. This is the premise of nearly all books in the how-to-become-a-better-writer genre. I know this because I was once a wannabe fiction writer who was scared as hell that I didn’t have the magical element required to tell compelling stories. As I write this, I can spot on my shelves the following books: On Writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, The Art of Fiction, The Art of the Novel, Aspects of the Novel, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, This Year You Write Your Novel, Reading Like a Writer, and How Fiction Works. And I’ve read every damn one of them.

Though some were revelatory—especially the first, by Stephen King, and the last, by James Wood—most of them failed to improve my writing, though they sure as hell improved my reading, and some left me discouraged and overwhelmed. Novelists and critics wrote these books, practitioners of the art, who, it mostly turns out, are terrifically adept at elucidating narrative strategies but less skilled at demonstrating how to put those techniques into practice. And often you’re left not with literary ability but a sense of awe at just how great the great writers are.

Roy Peter Clark, unlike most of the authors above, has made a living solely by producing these kinds of instructive texts. Clark began his career as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) before joining, in 1979, the Poynter Institute, a non-profit school dedicated to journalism (and founded, not coincidentally, by Nielson Poynter, owner and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times). Clark has taught writing in every iteration one could think of, and he channels this vast experience into edifying guides like Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (2006), The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English (2010), Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces (2011), and his latest, The Art of X-Ray Reading, all published by Little, Brown. While most of his previous books tended to focus on professional and journalistic writing, The Art of X-Ray Reading is pretty exclusively aimed at fiction writers. Can Clark with his long career in instruction rather than critique produce a better and more helpful book than James Wood? Will his vocation as an educator—as opposed to a practicing novelist—help or hinder his project? Can he—or anyone else—actually make my writing better?

In his introduction, Clark defines his concept of “X-ray reading” as the method used by writers. “This special vision,” he writes, “allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There, invisible to the rest of us, they observe the machinery of making meaning.” From these observations comes a kind of “reverse engineering” that “are then stored in a writer’s tool shed in boxes with names like grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box—rhetoric.” This is an assuredly reasonable premise; it is not “watch how the greats do it,” but rather, “learn how the greats see it.” Clark, it seems, may lend us his boat, rod, and tackle, but he will not feed us any fish.

