Copying and imitating the works of great writers can help you learn more about writing and enhance your style.
If you visit art museums, you often see one or more painters in front of easels, making copies of paintings on the walls. This is called master copy painting, and is one of the ways painters learn their craft. It involves copying the work of a famous painter to understand their technique. By doing this, painters learn about composition, color, and brushstrokes.
Writers can do this too, and it’s called copywork. Writers like Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, and Robert Louis Stevenson used copywork to learn how to write. Hunter Thompson famously typed out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms while working at Time magazine in order to learn his chops.
In addition to copywork, imitation is another exercise that can help you discover and refine your style. This involves writing like a famous author. Not because you want to write a novel in their style, but because imitation can help you understand how that style works and give you ideas for honing your own writing style.
How to practice copywork
Copywork is pretty simple. You sit down with a book by an author you admire or whose style you appreciate, and you copy the book. You can do this in longhand in a notebook, on a computer in Scrivener, or on a typewriter. The goal isn’t just to make a copy mindlessly, it’s to think about the words, the sentences, the rhythms as you write. When you copy out a book you have to think about each word and each sentence as you reproduce them, and this helps you absorb the author’s style, as well as spot their weaknesses.
Hunter Thompson, who famously practiced copywork early in his career, said in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose:
“If you type out somebody’s work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly, it’s like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald – these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me – so yeah, I wanted to learn from the best, I guess.”
As you write or type, you’ll learn from the way the author uses words, the way their dialogue flows, and you’ll have a better appreciation for their pacing. What may at first seem like a pointless exercise may reveal its value as you start thinking like that writer, almost predicting how their sentences are going to end.
The risk of doing this is going too deep into a specific author’s style and subconsciously writing that way. To avoid this, you might want to copy out short stories by a variety of authors. They could be contemporary or classic writers, and the more varied the authors you copy, the more exposure you get to the styles and rhythms of language.
While reading widely helps you learn about different styles, the books you read go by pretty quickly. When you copy a writer’s work, you spend a lot of time with it. I can touch type around 80 words per minute. Even The Great Gatsby, a short novel at just under 50,000 words, would take me around 12 hours to type. Focusing on a novel over that amount of time, and in that detail, gives great insight into a writer’s style.
After you’ve done this for a while, go back to your own writing. You may find that some of the writers you’ve copied inspire you to use words differently.
How to practice imitation
Imitation is different from copywork. Instead of copying another author’s book word for word, you write in an author’s style. Let’s say you like Henry James. You could read – and perhaps copy – a Henry James novel, then decide to write a scene or chapter in the style of the novel. You could imagine what a character would do differently from James’s plot and write that chapter. If you like how it unfolds, you might want to go on and write some more.
What’s important here is to try to imitate the style of the writing. This is how jazz musicians learn to improvise, and it’s a great way for writers to try out new styles.
Do you want to write snappier dialogue? Try reading novels by Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler, then writing scenes with their characters, or create your own characters and have them talk. Do you want to practice writing descriptions? Read some books by Margaret Atwood or Donna Tartt, then write descriptions inspired by their styles. Are you interested in exploring minimalist writing styles? Read Raymond Carver or Lydia Davis and write concise stories as they do.
A variant of imitation is adapting another author’s work in your style. For example, you could edit or rewrite a chapter from a novel by William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf, adapting it to the way you write. This makes you think about several things. You look at the original style, which, in these two examples, may seem dated, and you modernize it. You examine the way characters and descriptions are realized and modify them to fit your style. And you turn the original dialogue into your own voice.
Copywork gives you intimate knowledge of how great writers work, and imitation helps you flex your muscles as a writer and try out new styles. Try both of these exercises and see if they expand your writer’s toolkit.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.