Teach Yourself to Be a Copycat
Want to write like your favorite author? Open one of their books and start typing.
When I first started writing professionally, I copied like crazy. Not literally copied — I didn’t lift sentences or ideas — but copied in the way an apprentice woodworker might copy a master woodworker, following the curves, mimicking the cuts and joinery, lining up my work against the model. I think it was a good habit. Quite by accident, I was teaching myself to write.
There are times when imitating the work you admire can result in something that sounds stilted, faux, flimsy. But what could be better than studying the way someone really good cobbles sentences together, paces a story, builds a narrative? It’s like studying Tiger Woods videos to improve your golf swing: Watching and repeating how it’s done well is how you learn. In the beginning, it’s likely that your work will sound, well, imitative. But imitate good work often enough and you’ll start to inhabit your own writing more, and eventually it will sound like you, and you can take off the training wheels.
I was bowled over by Tom Wolfe when I first started writing, and I’m sure some of my early pieces exuded more than a whiff of his tone and tenor. But there was only one Tom Wolfe, and I really don’t sound like him at all, and over time I started sounding less like a cut-rate Tom Wolfe and more like me. I still loved having his books on my desk while I was working, and whenever I got stuck on a piece I would paw through them, looking for ways he solved whatever writing problem I was having. It helped me enormously.
I still keep a few prized books on my desk when I’m writing, and I’ve flipped through them so often, looking for answers, that they’re falling apart. They’re the best teachers I’ve ever had.
