Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark shows you how to mine masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Publisher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-316) and index.

Introduction: Where writers learn their best moves -- X-raying Gatsby : power of the parts -- X-raying Lolita : words at play -- X-raying Hemingway and Didion : words left out -- X-raying James Joyce : language as sacrament -- X-raying Sylvia Plath : jolt of insight -- X-raying Flannery O'Connor : dragon's teeth -- X-raying "The lottery" : piling stones -- X-raying Madame Bovary : signs of inner life -- X-raying Miss Lonelyhearts and A visit from the Goon Squad : texts within texts -- X-raying King Lear and The grapes of wrath : tests of character -- X-raying Gabriel García Márquez : making it strange -- X-raying Homer, Virgil, Roth- and Hitchcock : zooming in -- X-raying Chaucer : pointing the way -- X-raying Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : careless wish -- X-raying Macbeth : ends of things -- X-raying Shakespeare's sonnets : shaking the form -- X-raying Moby-Dick : three little words -- X-raying W.B. Yeats : sacred center -- X-raying Zora Neale Hurston : words on fire -- X-raying Harper Lee : weight of the wait -- X-raying M.F.K. Fisher : cooking a story -- X-raying Hiroshima : stopped clock -- X-raying Rachel Carson and Laura Hillenbrand : sea inside us -- X-raying Toni Morrison : repetitious variation -- X-raying Charles Dickens and Donna Tartt : echo of text -- Great sentences from famous authors : an exercise in X-ray reading -- Twelve steps to get started as an X-ray reader.