For the last year, I’ve been working nonstop with writers from outside of academia who want to be published authors. Here are two good things these creatives have in common: passion and determination. Here is one negative habit they share: they all read passively.

Passive reading—or pleasure reading—certainly has its time and place, namely on the beach or while tucked under a fuzzy blanket in a vacation rental. But if you truly want to publish, you have to learn to read professionally. You have to get super active with your reading—invest some actual sweat.

Here are a few tips that have helped me, personally, to switch from reading for pleasure to reading for performance. (Spoiler alert: they all involve figuring out how other writers accomplish things so you can do them, too.)

• Identify POVS and POV shifts: This is especially important for beginning writers who struggle with “head hopping” and/or fluid changes in perspective. First step is to grab at least three books where multiple perspectives are used. Then grab a colored pencil (unless the book is from the library, in which case, use photographs and notes instead). Open the first book, and underline any cues as to what perspective we are in. Those cues might be super obvious — maybe the chapter starts with “Amy’s Diary” as it does in Gone Girl. Or maybe those cues are not obvious at all — if you want a really hard perspective assignment, try marking up the novel I’m Thinking of Ending Thingsby Iain Reid which is written by a narrator with multiple personalities.Now move on to a book which features multiple narrators—Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers and Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone are awesome books to practice on. Pick up a few more colored pencils and start investigating how the author differentiates between voices. Does one narrator use shorter sentences than the other? What’s their punctuation like? How about their use (or abhorrence) of adjectives and adverbs? If the shifts between POVS are more nuanced than one chapter narrated by X and one chapter narrated by Y, figure out which devices the author uses to signal POV shifts. And then hold up these examples against your own writing. What are you doing well? Where could you improve?
• Time how long descriptive scenes last: Understanding that readers want to see and feel the world that we’re describing is one thing, but understanding when to stop talking about the way the grass smells in Hodgenville, Kentucky is quite another. Pick up a published book you loved and track how long the author describes a setting for. A paragraph? Two pages? Mysteries and thrillers are particularly adept at scene setting in a hurry — the descriptions are economic. However long you’ve gone on about a setting in your manuscript for, try to do it in half the amount of space, just as a challenge.
• Borrow dialog tags: A dialog tag is how a writer indicates which character is speaking. (He said, they yelled, Clifford the dog barked.) Sometimes, in our first drafts, we go into too much detail about how a character is saying something and what kind of gestures they’re using while saying it. Take a look at how other authors are doing dialog tags and gestures . And what about their conversational flow? Are their characters speaking in full sentences? Are they muttering non-sequiturs? Losing their train of thought? Interrupting others? Mumbling, gesticulating, looking at their shoes? Try something different in your own dialog and gestures from what you’ve been doing all along.
• Follow the breadcrumbs of conflict: Although I used to fight my agent on this, I now believe that most manuscripts — fiction and nonfiction — do need to have conflict. Not all books are going to flash that conflict on the opening pages, but most will hint at the conflict to come. Grab that trusty colored pencil again and highlight where those conflict breadcrumbs are in the opening pages of the books you most admire. How and where are we getting indications that all is not right in the state of Denmark, and how can we do this better in our own books?

And there you have it. No matter where this post is meeting you in your writing journey — maybe you’re struggling with an opening that drags, multiple narrative voices that don’t sound different from each other, or perhaps you’ve decided you don’t want to apply to a summer writers’ conference that isn’t going to meet in person — I hope you’re able to get back some energy and clarity with these professional reading tips.

I’m all about pragmatic approaches to creative writing. For more activities like this, subscribe to my newsletter. Or read BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL, the “how–to book for a new era of publishing” according to LitHub.