How to Use Another Writer to Learn How to Write
It is not surprising when you go to an art museum and you see people sitting and copying a painting. It is fascinating to watch them, to
see how they meticulously copy what some master has done. When you think about what they are doing, when you project yourself into
that artist’s activity you can see them learning how the master artist made the choices he or she made, how the brushstrokes were
done, every element of the painting can be examined this way and understood in a way that passively looking at it won’t reveal at the
same level of observation.
The same can be said of learning to write by meticulously studying what another writer has achieved. At first, and for many of us this is a
wonderful way to learn, copying in a notebook the words of a writer whose work we admire can open up to us levels of meaning that
weren’t there before. Other writing teachers have written about this kind of exercise. It is not a new concept or a particularly difficult one to
understand. What is difficult about it, for many, is that it demands concentration, it takes time, lots of time to slow down and use a pen or
pencil and really write down the words, fill the page with someone else’s thoughts and follow the way the breath and the pacing of the
sentences comes out.
Why would a beginning writer want to do this? I think there are many good reasons for this. One is that we rarely are taught these days to
pay that kind of attention to another writer’s words. The choices that he or she has made, the ways in which not only are the sentences
begun and ended but the ways in which the pacing of short and long sentences, the point at which new thoughts are begun, the use of
commas, the numbers of adjectives and adverbs are never observable to cursory readers. And what emerges more than anything else,
is the awesome mastery of the language, the obvious thoughtfulness and care that went into the selection of each word, each
punctuation mark, the kind of concern a writer, a good writer, must have to construct the story so that when you finish reading it in this
way you can see what enormous control and thought went into it.
Another reason for paying this kind of close attention to the word-by-word advance of the story is that most beginning writers have very
little awareness of what a style is and how one creates a style. We tend to believe that we write the way we speak. If only that were true.
We don’t. We also have to develop a different type of control over the language as a writer than we do as speakers. Re-creating on the
page what an author has done stylistically allows us to think and play with our own ideas about style.
A further reason for this type of close analysis has to do with the lost art of memorization. We are no longer required in school to
memorize anything of a literary nature. We do not therefore have within us the ramblings of a Tennyson or the staccato of an Ogden
Nash. Other peoples’ language is more in the nature of song lyrics, jingles from advertisers than it is the iambic pentameter of
Shakespeare’s sonnets or the terza rima of Dante’s Divine Comedy. We don’t therefore live with something more serious and lasting
than the latest television ads or the lyrics of some pop song, none of which have any of the linguistic qualities you need to employ in your
own writing, let alone do they allow you access within yourself to more complex and involved ideas, situations, feelings. The point of that
type of writing is that it is facile and sentimental, doesn’t tax you either emotionally or intellectually. It is meant to sell you something or to
appeal to a huge audience. Thus, its sole purpose is, in my opinion, to bother you, pester you into paying attention to it and to go out and
buy whatever it is selling or tune it in at night, but never to ask you to question anything about life, your life, the way you live, the way you
may need to change your life.
These are three of the reasons for paying this type of close attention to another writer’s work. I want to move from this to the next level of
close attention. This I call modeling, some call it copying, whatever you call it, what matters is that this way of learning how to build a
story is a good way and an engaging way to both test your abilities at observation and at the same time to learn to incorporate into what it
is that interests you about another’s work into your own.
Many times a term when I teach this way, I need to rein in the student’s approach to the story. There are reasons a student chooses a
particular story, not all of them obvious to him or her. Some are the more personal, the subject matter of the story itself interests the
student. Or the psychological or emotional underpinnings of the protagonist’s dilemma interests or strikes a sympathetic chord in the
student. No matter what that personal response may be, the ultimate reason for choosing a story is that it will teach you something that
you could not do before. It will teach you how to create a conflict, because there will be one presented to you, it will teach you how a plot
needs to be developed, because you will see the ways in which the chosen conflict has determined the plot of the story, and it will teach
you to understand what it is the story is really about, because you will need to understand the context (worldview, if you will) of the writer’s
interests as a storyteller.
Let’s begin with the idea of conflict. In another essay you can find on this site (Conflict), I have detailed the four main kinds of conflict we
find in fiction. When you choose a story to model on, think about what kind of conflict the character (protagonist) has, whether that conflict
has been resolved in the story and how has it been resolved. In other words, what kinds of events occur in the story, what are the
obstacles the protagonist must overcome in order to resolve the conflict and how has that plot been constructed in order to come to that
conclusion?
You can begin to study the modeled story by writing down the conflict. For you as a writer, I would recommend always knowing that as
soon as possible when you are writing a story. Vague ideas and vague notions of characters tend not to lead you to a very coherent idea
of what the story you are writing is about. So, write down the conflict in the story and then write down the plot of the story. Follow as best
you can the developments of that plot, being aware not of character development or place description, but of the dramatic action of the
story. Then you will know what the spine of the story is. You will have a clear picture of what it is that holds the story together.
I would suggest at this point that you then pay attention to the role that all of the other characters play in the story. Once you understand
their function, you can begin to build your own story, following precisely the conflict and the plot of the modeled story. If the author has
given you a grandmother as a touchstone for his or her protagonist, then you must too; using a different type of character skews the story.
If the author has an ending where the character dies, then yours must too. There can be no deviation not because of some tyrannical
side to this exercise, but because the exercise is about learning what someone else can teach you about how short stories are
constructed. It is from this type of strict and if you will rigid adherence to the ways in which they created a story that the language of the
form will begin to enter your mind.
I do think that this form, the short story form, like other literary forms, needs to be learned and treated as if it were a foreign language. The
way we learn a new language is to be taught both its grammar (its structure) and the vocabulary. The same works for learning how to
write short stories. The more you do this type of exercise, the repetition is key to learning a language as it is to learning to write, the more
you will understand what makes a good short story and the better a writer you will become.
Returning now to what you have done to this point. You have outlined your own idea for this story following the same kinds of pathways of
the model’s plot, having begun with the same conflict. Sometimes at this point, it helps to do a little check of yourself by writing the final
paragraph of your own story. If you find that your ending is not similar to the model’s, then your plot is off. But let’s assume all is in order,
the next step is to look carefully at what I have referred to above as the context or the worldview of the chosen author. There is a context in
which a storyteller’s work lives, out of which it grows, it is the worldview of that author and it is the “why” usually for needing to write in the
first place.
I tend to be suspicious of writers who talk about personal _expression not because I don’t believe we all have our very personal reasons
for writing, but because if that is what is of paramount interest to the writer, they aren’t going to have much to say beyond that. If, however,
you look at a writer and can see that beyond this kind of subjectivity resides an interesting mind that is concerned with the political, the
philosophical, the historical, the religious, the artistic, the scientific, the legal, then there is someone behind the curtain, in fact, who has
much to offer. Their language and their representations of character will help you determine what type of context they write from and
exploring that world with them, soaking up not just their actual stories but the world they care about outside of the stories per se can offer
you a kind of curriculum that you wouldn’t have by just reading their work. The critical responses to a writer’s work will also offer you a
tremendous amount of guidance in these studies. I am not referring to book reviews only but if you have chosen a writer who has
achieved a certain amount of critical success, he or she will have been written about by all kinds of writers, both those who write fiction,
those who write about fiction and those who write critical biographies. The letters and diaries of these authors may be available and
other kinds of writings that they have published can also shed light on why they have made the kinds of choices in their work that they
have.
For this reason, it is always a good choice to spend your time learning from a true master. The wealth of material will be probably more
than you have time to read, but will definitely offer you loads of information and provide wonderful insights into not only who that writer
was but allow you to ask yourself why this writer has been so intriguing to you, how has her or his work affected you and what can you do
with that knowledge?
Once you have written a draft of the story you have modeled, you can decide if that story interests you enough to work on revising it. My
suggestion would be to set it aside, pick another story by this same author, and repeat the activity again and again until you feel you have
mastered the master. All the while you can be reading about her or him and thinking about the ways in which he or she viewed the world
and the ways in which you do.
There will come a time when you need a new master and you should move on to the next one. And of course, do what you did with the
first one. It is very reassuring to know that there are probably more masters out there than we can ever pay as much attention to as we
should. That means that as writers we never have to stop learning about our craft and to my way of thinking, that is a very good thing.