There's a moment, somewhere around your tenth year of writing seriously, where you stop reading like a reader and start reading like a writer. You can't go back.

The shift is small but total. You notice the seams. You can feel a paragraph break being delayed by half a beat for rhythm. You catch the writer dropping a clause to keep a sentence from over-balancing. Most of all, you notice the cuts — the place where a different writer would have added a paragraph and this one didn't.

It changes what you read. Some authors who were thrilling at twenty become tiring at thirty-five — the seams now look obvious. Others (Hazlitt, Berger, Le Guin) get better — you finally see the workmanship.

The cost: you can't enjoy bad prose anymore. The benefit: you can learn from anyone. Even a paragraph in a magazine can teach you something if you read it slowly enough.

Related: Margin notes, A year of reading less, writing more.

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