Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you\u2019ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people\u2019s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else\u2019s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If this one doesn\u2019t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn\u2019t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The comma placement in Steve Martin\u2019s Pleasure of My Company<\/strong> told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino\u2019s Invisible Cities<\/strong>, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane\u2019s Young Wizard<\/strong> series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works. One day, he talked to us about writing. One … Continue reading Practice: Copy Style<\/span>