"If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing"
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Foote is selling an old-fashioned idea with a little swagger: you don’t learn to write by staring at “writing,” you learn by absorbing writers who made language do real work. The sentence structure is almost lecture-room bluntness - “That’s how” twice, no hedging - as if he’s swatting away the modern faith in technique, workshops, and credentialed expertise. He’s not arguing that craft advice is useless; he’s arguing that craft is inseparable from lived pages, from watching masters solve problems in real time.
The name list matters. Dickens is a clinic in propulsion and social observation, a writer who can make plot feel like weather. Faulkner is syntax under pressure, consciousness rendered as architecture. D.H. Lawrence brings bodily insistence and moral heat; Keats brings compression, musicality, and the discipline of image. Foote’s “everything you need” is provocation, but it’s also a theory of apprenticeship: style is caught, not taught. You internalize rhythm the way you internalize speech - by exposure until it becomes instinct.
Context sharpens the stance. Foote came up outside the MFA pipeline and became famous for narrative authority (especially his Civil War work), writing like a novelist even when he was doing history. His advice doubles as self-portrait: literature as a training ground for any serious prose, and reading as the most underrated, most demanding form of practice. Subtext: if you’re stuck, the problem isn’t your “process.” It’s your diet.
The name list matters. Dickens is a clinic in propulsion and social observation, a writer who can make plot feel like weather. Faulkner is syntax under pressure, consciousness rendered as architecture. D.H. Lawrence brings bodily insistence and moral heat; Keats brings compression, musicality, and the discipline of image. Foote’s “everything you need” is provocation, but it’s also a theory of apprenticeship: style is caught, not taught. You internalize rhythm the way you internalize speech - by exposure until it becomes instinct.
Context sharpens the stance. Foote came up outside the MFA pipeline and became famous for narrative authority (especially his Civil War work), writing like a novelist even when he was doing history. His advice doubles as self-portrait: literature as a training ground for any serious prose, and reading as the most underrated, most demanding form of practice. Subtext: if you’re stuck, the problem isn’t your “process.” It’s your diet.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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