Reading like a writer is one of the core practices we emphasize in our memoir method program. Last week, we explored why this skill matters—how it sharpens your instincts, deepens your craft, and helps you understand the invisible architecture behind the books you love. Reading like a writer is like slipping behind the curtain of a stage production to see how the magic happens. When pull back a bit to we study the mechanics—structure, pacing, scene work, emotional beats, narrative choices—to see what makes the story function, we are decoding how the decisions made during drafting, revising, and polishing ultimately shape the reader’s experience. Every choice you make on the page will create a specific impact, so reading like a writer becomes your most reliable training ground. It’s how you learn what works, why it works, and how to bring those techniques into your own memoir. Today, we’re reviewing the tools you can use right away as you pick up memoirs and analyze them with a craft‑focused lens.
Reading is essential to improving your writing skills, and reading like a writer means seeing past the glossy end-result into a book’s structure and the author’s choices about how the story is told. Learning to read like a writer doesn’t mean learning how to merely imitate but learning the craft by example. We’re excited to announce the launch of our Memoir Method Book Club! Your first session is free, so sign up to save your seat here.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Our philosophy regarding reading like a writer is supported by two basic truths about stepping into the role of writer.
First,every book you’ve ever loved was constructed through a long chain of writer’s choices. Truly. When a writer is drafting a manuscript, they are making decision after decision after decision. Some happen at the 10,000‑foot level—big structural calls about where the story begins, how it unfolds, what shape it takes. Others happen down in the weeds, where the choices feel more obvious: a line of dialogue or a sensory detail. Writing is never just a lightning bolt of inspiration. It’s a series of deliberate decisions, stacked one on top of another, until a book emerges.
Secondly, every one of those decisions represents nearly infinite possibilities—and none of them are inherently right or wrong. At Page & Podium, we see so many new writers arrive hoping that a coach will hand them “the correct choice.” But that’s not how writing works, and honestly, it wouldn’t serve you if it did. Each decision you make depends on the experience you want your reader to have. Who is that reader? What will resonate with them? What will feel unbelievable? What will make them lean in?
These are the questions that shape your choices. Reading widely and deeply means you are adding to your intuitive and deeply personal understanding of the relationship between words on the page and the reader consuming them.
To make this a deliberate practice, you can start by considering three essential levels of analysis that will help you go past reading to understand, taking in the wide‑angle, big‑picture view all the way down to the fine‑grained details. As you’ll see, the decisions made at the top inevitably ripple down to the bottom—which is a very important lesson for how you will consider your own work.
Reading for Structure
Reading for structure will have the biggest impact on how you think about the work, but unsurprisingly, it’s also the hardest level to do on your own. That’s because the other levels of writing—presentation and style—are designed to make structure relatively invisible. You’re not meant to see the studs, plumbing, and electrical behind the walls of a house, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to discern where they are behind the paint and drywall.
We have a mission at P & P to help first‑time memoirists understand why structure matters and how to build it in a way that doesn’t depend on a lightning bolt of inspiration. Structure is essential not only for finishing a book but also for keeping your reader engaged because the reader engagement hinges on trust.
You rarely encounter a professionally published book that lacks structure. Even works that appear experimental have a recognizable framework beneath the surface. The tricky part is that because we never see examples of unstructured books on shelves, it can be hard to recognize what “no structure” actually looks or feels like.
Think about the last time someone told you a story in conversation that seemed like they weren’t sure what the point was, what details mattered, or where they were headed. As a listener, you probably wanted out of the conversation because you don’t trust that the person is going somewhere that will be worth your attention. That’s exactly what it feels like to read a book without structure.
Reverse Outline
A reverse outline is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of outlining a book before it’s written, you take a finished book and outline it after the fact. This is a step we encourage writers take with their own books in revision, but it’s something you can do with books you read too. Section by section, you note what’s happening as briefly as possible. When you’re done, you have something that looks very much like a traditional outline, except now you’re holding the blueprint to a completed book.
And that’s the point. If you want to understand how the studs and beams of a house are arranged, the easiest way is to look at the blueprints. Reverse outlining gives you those blueprints. It lets you step back to the 10,000‑foot view and actually see the structure that’s holding the book together.
Structural discoveries
Blueprints in hand, you can then analyze things you liked or didn’t like about the full narrative.
Perhaps you felt the middle of the book dragged. When you create your reverse outline, you may suddenly see the problem clearly: There were sixty pages where nothing changes. Or there was a chapter that followed a different theme than what was set up in the ones before it. Or this section was all advice without stories or all stories without any context for how you should be applying the story to your life. These are structural issues—and now you know you don’t want to replicate it in your own work. Reverse outlining helps you identify your dislikes with precision, which is invaluable.
Perhaps a book grabbed you from the very first page. That’s often a structural choice too. Structure includes not just turning points but also where the author chooses to begin and end the story. With a reverse outline in hand, you can see how that opening page fits into the larger arc. This is especially illuminating in memoir, where the starting point is rarely chronological, but crucial for reader impact.
Your discoveries about what works for you
Remember—writing is a series of decisions. None of those individual decisions are always right or always wrong.
Even in the example of the “draggy” middle, that’s your experience. Another reader might love that slower, more reflective pacing. That chapter you didn’t think fit might be another reader’s favorite. There is no universal right answer. What matters is the impact on your reader—and readers vary wildly.
When we chase the “right” choice, we often end up with something generic. When we chase the choice that best serves our reader, we end up with something alive.
Reading for Presentation
“Presentation” is the word we’ll use here for content decisions on the paragraph and page level rather than the chapter and book level. 99% of presentation boils down to the decision of whether to show or tell, scene or exposition.
“Show, don’t tell” is probably one of the most famous pieces of writing advice. It’s also the best example of why writing advice that attempts to make “rules” is usually misleading, because the truth is you have to do both. Another way of thinking of “show” is sections that are “in scene,” meaning descriptions of people, places, and actions that could be captured by a camera. Another way of thinking of “tell” is exposition, which is where the author steps in to directly interpret, reflect on, or give internal insights.
For a very simple example: “I smiled” = show/scene. “I was happy” = tell/exposition.
Now, without context no one can say which of these sentences is better, but we can consider what they accomplish within the narrative, especially when you think about how they are both options to convey similar (but not equivalent) things, and the different opportunities they provide. Scene and exposition can also be highly intertwined, even within the same sentence.
Whether to show or tell is a choice you will need to make not once, but over and over again.
Reading for presentation means turning on your awareness to see when the writer is showing or telling and how they are blended and balanced. You reflect on how those choices feel to you. When you hit a stretch of exposition, do you feel grounded and informed—or bored and impatient? When you’re in a scene, do you feel immersed—or like the author is overdramatizing something that doesn’t need it?
You can even fold this into your reverse outline: mark which sections are primarily scene and which are primarily exposition. Over time, you’ll start to see patterns in what you personally respond to. If you don’t like a particular balance of show and tell in someone else’s book, chances are you won’t like it in your own either.
All of this is simply practice—flexing the muscle of noticing how writers present their material on the page. The more you train your eye at this level, the more intentional and confident your own choices about scene and exposition will become.
Reading for Style
All the little details on the page that aren’t structure or presentation make up the writer’s style. Once you’ve looked at the big‑picture architecture and the show‑versus‑tell decisions, everything else lives here: sentence rhythm, word choice, imagery, pacing at the line level.
Dialogue can be a significant style challenge for first time authors. It can feel awkward, stilted, or confusing, especially deciding whether to put something in “exact words” or summarize conversations and how to punctuate and format it. When you start paying close attention to how different authors handle dialogue, you’ll notice something important: there are guidelines, not hard rules. Every writer has their own stylistic preferences and presentational quirks. Some use lots of speech tags (he said/she said), some use almost none. Some lean into long, winding exchanges; others keep things sharp and minimal.
At this level, your job is to notice those choices and your reactions to them. Which stylistic choices resonate with you? Which ones pull you out of the story or feel distracting? Can you guess why the author made that choice in that moment?
As a writer‑reader, your task is to translate what you observe into your own evolving style. You’re not copying; you’re collecting data. You’re learning what feels alive to you on the page, what helps you connect, and what you want to avoid. All of that becomes raw material for your own attempt to reach your reader, share your story, and maybe make their path a little lighter than it was before they picked up your book.
