Annotations: Reading Like a Writer

One of the best ways to learn the craft of writing is to study the work you admire.  The key is to truly study it, rather than simply admire it. (It’s also possible to learn from work you don’t admire, but when you have the choice, learning from the former is usually preferable.) To put it another way, the key is to read like a writer, not (merely) like a reader. To truly understand how a piece of writing works, or even how one small part of it works, it’s important to articulate your observations and understanding precisely.

An annotation is a brief analysis of a piece of writing intended to help the writer learn about some aspect of craft. Annotations are meant to be practical, directly serving the development of your own work. Writing good annotations efficiently takes practice. It’s often helpful to generate possible topics, and consider how they might be developed, before plunging in.

This guide focuses on annotating fiction, but the same general approach can be applied to poetry, nonfiction, plays, screenplays, and songs.

Where to Start

1)    Start with a craft topic suggested by the work, such as

a)           An element, technique, device, or choice obviously essential to the story* (*used throughout to mean short story, novella, novel, chapter, excerpt, etc.)

b)           An element, technique, device, or choice that is unusual in some way, or

c)           An element, technique, device, choice, or effect that is either puzzling or for some other reason interesting to you

OR

2)    Start with a craft topic suggested by your own work, and look to see how that element, technique, device, etc. is used in the story you’ve read. This can be

a)           Something you’ve been working on in your own fiction or having trouble with,  

b)           Something you’ve been hesitant to try, but feel you should attempt

c)           Something you’ve been using almost out of habit, to the point that you worry you’ve neglected to examine all its possibilities

d)           Something that came up in a discussion of your fiction and seems important to pursue

 OR

3)    Start with a craft topic suggested by a class or lecture or an essay about writing (or even about something analogous to writing), and work to understand how the story you’ve read illustrates or demonstrates what the lecturer/author said.

For example:

1a) You’ve read John Updike’s “A & P.” You realize that one of the story’s strengths is the way that it is grounded in setting—not just in a grocery store, but in an A&P near the beach as seen through the eyes of the teenaged narrator. So you ask, “How does Updike use concrete detail to convey setting and atmosphere—and, simultaneously, to characterize the narrator?”

1b) You’ve read Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles. You notice that the stories move fluidly through past, present, and future, in no predictable pattern. You thought only Alice Munro did that. Focusing on one story, you ask, “What is the effect of Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s manipulation of time in “Yurt”? Specifically, why does it end with a memory, and what does that reveal about the present?” Or you ask, “How does Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum move so nimbly and unpredictably through time without confusing the reader? Specifically, how does she guide us with transitions, repetition, and temporal markers?”

1c) You’ve read Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. The novel contains words you’ve never seen before, words you can’t find in any English or Spanish dictionary. At first this is annoying; but then you realize that you have a pretty good idea of what the words mean because of how they’re used. You begin with a question: “What’s the point of using words no reader knows?” Then you consider that the novel is about a woman crossing the border from Mexico into the United States, and the fact that, as a telephone operator in a small town, she also serves as a translator. Your question now becomes, “How does Herrera’s use of neologisms put the reader in the position of one or more of his characters?” or even, “How do Herrera’s neologisms and use of invented place names influence how we read his novel?”

 2a) You’ve written a story about a man who loves his wife and children, who is good at his work, volunteers at a literacy center, and is much admired by everyone, including your readers. In your story, a co-worker gradually persuades the man to betray his wife and children, embezzle from his employer, and steal the wheelchair from his elderly neighbor. The problem: your readers don’t believe that the good man on the first page has become the deeply flawed man on the final page. Happily, you’ve read Anton Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog,” a story about a married man who enjoys adulterous flings, but who discovers true love when he meets Anna, the lady with the pet dog. You realize that one of the great challenges for that story is to persuade readers that Gurov, an apparent cynic, can in fact be moved by relatively naïve Anna. So you ask, “How is Gurov’s character established, and how does Chekhov persuade the reader that he is vulnerable to change?” Or you ask, “What are the significant steps in Gurov’s transformation? Where do they occur?” Or, more specifically, “How is Gurov’s transformation played out over each section of the story?” Or you ask, “How are narrative commentary and access to Gurov’s thoughts combined to create our understanding of him?” (For an even more direct analog, you might examine Chekhov’s “Misfortune.”)

2b) You’ve become oddly obsessed with the way you account for the passing of time. You feel you’re constantly writing sentences that begin, “Later the same day…,” “The very next morning…,” “Wednesday of that same week…,” etc. You ask yourself, “What other ways are there to account for the passage of time?” You search through the story you’ve read, looking for alternatives.

Or,

While everyone tells you that “said” is “invisible” in passages of dialogue, you can see it in yours, and it bothers you. You wonder how other writers attribute dialogue—what verbs they use and where they place them. You also wonder what some of the options are for indicating the identity of a speaker without providing an attributive. You go back through the story you’ve read to see how the speakers of dialogue are identified.

3) You read an essay suggesting that interesting things can happen when characters tell stories. One of the books mentioned is Helon Habila’s Travelers, which is new to you. You read the novel and see that a lot of the characters tell stories, some of them quite long. You find two of them particularly engaging, and notice that they’re conveyed very differently. You examine what makes each of them compelling, attending not only to content but to how they are told.

Or,

You read something in a book or essay on craft that seems enlightening, insightful, provocative, surprising and—the bottom line—potentially useful, and you look to see how that craft-related insight might be applied to a specific story in order to further your own understanding.

Once You Have the Topic and the Text

As should be clear by now, you don’t necessarily need to focus on an entire story, chapter, or novel. In fact, one of the keys to this sort of examination is narrowing the field, both defining the topic precisely (so not “characterization,” but “How Character X is Made Convincingly Complex,” or “How Secondary Characters are Used to Reveal the Main Character”) and focusing on one or a few representative passages. If, for instance, you’re writing about depictions of setting, there’s no need to look at every setting in a novel; look at one or two you feel are noteworthy, and look as closely as you can at what the writer has done. Then:

Read the story or novel passage at least three times.

The first time, you’re simply reading for content and first impressions.

The second time, focus on those passages—words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, scenes—that seem most directly relevant to your topic, and most likely to illuminate it. Your topic might require demonstrating progression or variety; if so, carefully select enough illustrative passages to demonstrate the progression or variety, without turning the annotation into an enormous list, or repeating yourself. In most cases, three or four passages will be sufficient; in some cases, one is sufficient (if, for example, you’re examining how the terms of a story are established in its opening paragraph, or how plot, meaning, and character are resolved in its final paragraph). You might underline or highlight the most apparently useful passages, but it can be even more useful to write or type them out. You are not obliged to discuss the entire text; in fact, part of the challenge is to focus narrowly, precisely, on the moments of the text most pertinent to your topic.

At this point you have a topic and relevant excerpts from the text. The next step is to analyze—to attempt to understand and explain—those passages. Keep in mind that an annotation can record the act of exploration, or the process of moving toward understanding. You don’t need to assert knowledge you don’t have; you should feel free to pose questions, so long as you try to answer them.

It may be easiest to think of analysis in terms of a few simple steps:

1)    Describe what you see.

2)    Explain the local effect of what you see.

3)    Explain how that local effect serves one or more of the story’s larger goals.

If the passage you’re analyzing is difficult or complex, or if you’re studying a small scale aspect of craft (say, the long sentences in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West), it may be useful to devote much of your time to description (the diction, syntax, tone, placement, etc., of those sentences). If the local effect is fairly apparent, it may be more useful to spend most of your time considering how the author’s choices serve the larger story. When in doubt, looking at less material carefully will usually be more beneficial than looking at a lot of material generally. Some excellent annotations have been written about single sentences.

That said, if your topic requires looking at the whole—if, for instance, you want to understand the structure of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation—the key is to focus on the defining aspects of that structure, and not to get distracted by plot summary, character development, and other issues. For a topic like that one, it might be helpful to begin with a list or outline.

If you’re studying several passages, you’re likely to note similarities and differences. When you do consider a logical order for your examples (Simplest to most complex? Similar components to distinct variations?). A common mistake is to simply track an aspect of craft—say, description of setting—from the beginning of the story to the end, when a more illuminating organization would emphasize the most significant descriptions, or the changes in setting, or the story’s repeated use of certain descriptive words or phrases.

Conclude with a paragraph explicitly discussing the immediate or potential relevance of the annotation to your own fiction.

Before you consider the annotation complete, read the story a third time, both to see if you’ve overlooked anything and to make sure the conclusions you’ve drawn are clearly supported by the text.

Varieties of Annotations

None of this is meant to be restrictive; you might very well discover other effective approaches to generating topics and to composing annotations.

Annotations can be formal—written in the third person, with formal diction, for a larger, unidentified audience of Interested Others—or less formal—written in the first person, more conversationally, essentially for yourself (though it might be more helpful to imagine that you’re trying to explain what you’ve found to a friend who is also a writer). If your annotations tend to be informal to the point of imprecision, or if they turn into reviews, you might need to steer toward formality; and if your annotations start to become academic papers, literary criticism, reviews, or something else not clearly linked to your concerns for your own work, you may need to try a less formal approach.

On some occasions, it may be appropriate to write an annotation that is largely descriptive, or one that looks something like a list, or catalog—say, a discussion of various types of surprise, from syntax to plot, in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” On other occasions, it may be appropriate for an annotation to be an argument. An “argument” in this context is (most often) not an attack against a certain choice or strategy in a particular story, but a reasoned defense of a thesis (for instance, “In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes expository paragraphs that have the vividness and emotional impact of scenes,” or “While David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon inhabits the thoughts of many characters, ultimately it tells the reader a story that no one character fully understands”). If your annotations tend to be general, or superficial, or if you tend to make sweeping judgments, you may need to attempt to suspend judgment entirely and concentrate on looking at the text more closely, describing what you observe more precisely. If your annotations are merely descriptive, or if you simply ask questions, you may need to turn your questions into thesis statements and to support your theses.

Usually, annotations focus on a single craft topic in a single short story, novella, or novel. Over time, you might find it helpful to write at greater length to compare a particular aspect of two or more stories.

Once you feel comfortable annotating work by other writers, you might try annotating one of your own stories, to help you become a more objective reader of your own drafts.

Common Problems

The craft topic is not clearly stated or defined.

The craft focus is not sufficiently narrow.

The craft focus is well chosen, but the annotation wanders from it.

The annotation does not investigate its stated topic in sufficient detail.

The annotation does not cite specific passages/examples from the text.

The annotation consists largely of plot summary.

The annotation is primarily about theme or meaning.

The annotation lists examples, but does not provide analysis or comment.

The analysis is not clearly expressed.

The annotation emphasizes opinion, or the passing of judgment, without sufficient supporting analysis.

The annotation is not clearly organized.

Keep in mind that:

1) Annotations do not need to have, and in most cases will not have, secondary sources. You have no responsibility to read other work by the same author, to acquaint yourself with the author’s life, to read reviews or criticism. An annotation is based on your own close reading. (If, however, you find yourself uncertain how to frame your topic or thesis sentence—if you’re unsure how to define the element of craft you’re examining—you might refer to a handbook, or to an essay on fiction writing, in order to adopt another writer’s definition of a term, or even to take issue with it.) 

2) It doesn’t matter if other people already understand the thing that you’re trying to understand. Your job is not to add to the world’s collective knowledge, or to think of an annotation topic no one else has ever written about. Your sole responsibility is to add to your understanding of how to write a story, and to articulate your discovery.

3) Annotations should be narrowly focused. While the story you’re discussing may be fascinating for many reasons, try to focus on the single topic you’ve selected.

4) You do not need to summarize the story, or to pass judgment on it.

5) While an annotation should be effectively organized and clearly expressed, there is no need to revise it dozens of times, the way you would a piece of fiction. Annotations are meant to be functional. Save your hard-earned prose for the fiction. (That said, keep in mind that imprecision, abstraction, and vagueness can be contagious, and could spread to your fiction.)

 A Very Limited Beginning of a List of Possible Annotation Topics

The best topics are the ones that you feel directly address issues for your own work, and that are well illustrated by the text you’ve chosen. If you’re not sure where to begin, though, here are some possibilities:

The effect of point of view in X

The use of interior monolog in X

Shifts between point of view characters in X

Shifts in narrative distance in X

The distinctions between the narrative’s perspective and the first person narrator’s

            (or third person pov character’s) perspective in X

Narrative intrusions in X

Dramatic irony in X

The balance of scene and exposition in X

The effects of active verbs in X

Diction in X

The effects of sentence structure/sentence rhythm in X

Effective repetition in X

Parallel structure in X

Tension and surprise in the syntax of X

Compression in X

The effects of sentence variety in X

The intentional use of clichés in X

Wordplay in X

The effects of adjectives and adverbs in X

Irregular punctuation in X

The use of figurative speech in X

The absence of figurative speech in X

Modulation of tone in X

The gradual revealing of character in X

The influences of secondary characters on the main character in X

The influence of minor characters on plot in X

Counterpointed characters in X

Consistent inconsistency and surprise in characters in X

Multiple perspectives of the main character provided in X

Intentional use of stereotype in X

Variation on stereotype in X

The effectiveness of character names in X

Plot development in X

Multiple plotlines, or braided structure, in X

Unresolved plotlines in X

Effective variation on a familiar plot in X

Foreshadowing in X

Tension and suspense in X

The control of mystery in X

The controlled release of information in X

Effective use of short scenes in X

The use of space breaks in X

Omitted or reported scenes in X

Effective use of extended dialogue in X

The relationship between setting and character in X

Effective use of epiphany in X

Characterization through dialogue in X

Tension between the said and unsaid in X

Conflict conveyed by characters saying “no” in X

Jargon, slang, and technical vocabulary in X

The use of foreign words and phrases in X

Conveying foreign-ness in English dialogue in X

Descriptions of faces in X

Physical descriptions of characters in X

The creation of atmosphere in X

Description of setting in X

Description filtered through POV character in X

Conflicting descriptions in X

Generic settings in X

Accumulating descriptions in X

Patterns of imagery in X