I learned to read—I mean learned to read carefully—in 1969. I was in graduate school then and trying to figure out if I should begin to write short stories. … I did not know very much. …

Part of my school training as a writer, however, provided that I could learn how to teach. It was felt by my teachers—writers themselves—that if we students ever became the real things, we would probably never be able to support ourselves that way and so could teach as a fallback …

What exactly this teacher training entailed was going before a class of undergraduates, asking them to read several short stories and novels chosen and discussed among us assistants by an overseeing professor, and then, for three days a week, teaching. Teaching fiction. And what I found my problem to be was that I couldn’t imagine the first thing to do, because I didn’t in any way I could convey to another human, know how to read. … Even more awful was that I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know.

[So I approached one of my professors.] What I said was this: “I am having trouble knowing exactly how to go about teaching this Anderson story.”

“Tell me, Mr. Ford,” [he] said, still softly, when he’d sat in silence for a while, flipping pages thorough the story in my anthology, glancing at my underlinings, raising his eyebrows at my notes … “Tell me just this,” he said again, and looked up at me quizzically, then at the ceiling, as if he’d begun rehearsing some life of his own from years ago, which the story had pleasantly revived. “What, um, what do you think is the most interesting formal feature of this story? I’m, of course, not talking about anything particularly complicated. Just what you think about it.”

… I understand now that he was certain I had no idea in the world what he could be talking about, and that our tasks would begin from that point—the perfect point of origin. Zero. The place where all learning begins.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘formal feature,’” I answered in a good, clear voice. And with that I gave up some large part of my ignorance. I must’ve sensed I’d learn something valuable if I could only do that. And I was right.

“Well,” he said, bemused. “All right.” He nodded and sighed, then turned in his swivel chair to a green chalkboard on the wall, stood, and with a chalk wrote this list.

Character
Point of View
Narrative Structure
Imagistic Pattern
Symbol
Diction
Theme

These, of course, were words I’d seen. Most of them had been swirling around my thinking for days without order or directive. Now, here they were again, and I felt relieved.

These expressions, [my teacher said], sitting back in his chair but still looking at the list, described the formal features of a piece of fiction. If we could define them, locate them in a particular piece of fiction, and then talk about any one of them in a careful and orderly way, reliant on the words of the story and common sense, asking perfectly simple questions, proceeding to deductions one by one, perhaps talking about other features as they came to mind—eventually we would involve ourselves in a discussion of the most important issues in a story, or in a novel. In every story he himself read, he said, some one formal feature seemed to stand out as a conspicuous source of interest, and he could investigate the story that way. …

[My professor], naturally, never told me exactly what to do, and our talk never left the plane of the hypothetical/conditional (“one might ask this; isn’t it possible to wonder that? surely this is not completely irrelevant …”). But he taught. He taught me not only an orderly means to gain entry to an intimacy with a complex piece of narrative, but also that literature could be approached as empirically as life, to which after all it was connected.

—Richard Ford

From the essay “Reading,” transcribed by me from pages 55–56 and 60–64 of my hardback copy of Writers on Writing, © 1991 Middlebury College Press, Hanover, New Hampshire.

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