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this is similar to an exercise David Foster Wallace would do — take a longish piece of prose, read it once, then try to replicate it exactly without looking. A
by currymj 8y ago
this is similar to an exercise David Foster Wallace would do — take a longish piece of prose, read it once, then try to replicate it exactly without looking.
Assuming it’s long enough that you can’t hold it in working memory, you’ll end up with something that shows you the difference between your own instinctive writing style and whatever you are copying.
- tw1010 8y agoWhere did you read that? (I'm curious.) Ben Franklin did basically the same thing.
- godelmachine 8y agoBen Franklin imitated John Bunyan from Pilgrim's Progress if I am not wrong.
- currymj 8y agoi didn't remember, but searching around it looks like it was something he mentioned in an interview with Bryan A. Garner.
- fenomas 8y agoSide note, but this is quite similar to how Raymond Chandler taught himself to write (around age 40 IIRC). He'd take a short story he liked, make a detailed outline of the plot, then write a story from the outline and compare it to the original.