On Imitation

Writer's Workshop on tomorrow! 6-8pm at the Forest Center + (38 Castle Terrace)

Many writers learned their own unique style by first imitating the style of other authors. Stephen King practiced by imitating Melville's Moby Dick in college--and later imitated Emily Dickinson's experimental punctuation in his novelette, Carrie. Daniel Defoe imitated John Bunyan before attempting Robinson Crusoe, and Mark Twain paid homage to Daniel Defoe before writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Last week in our workshop we did some really challenging exercises based on the styles of well-read and great authors, such as Hemingway, Mark Twain, Dickens and Bukowski. As writers we need to read writing that we find inspiring, and return to some great books to examine what makes good writing great. What stylistic devices do the great authors use? How do they convey a place, an emotion, a character so convincingly?

Here's a passage from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California  is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses…

Notice the stylistic devices that he uses, such as a syntax that rambles and uses lists to pile words upon words using commas, "ands", and gives a sense of how much is contained in a place; diction that juxtaposes shorter words with longer ones to adjust the pace of the sentence; the specific sense of detail; alliteration that adds to the sound of the passage. 

During the workshop we read this passage from Cannery Row a few times, then put it away and gave some thought to a place that we were familiar (the places of course were different for each person). The place had to be somewhere that each participant could describe, a place that was evocative enough to picture (what objects can be found in the place? what does it smell like? what is the light like in this place?) We then used the passage from Cannery Row as a template to create our own unique Steinbeck-esque writing. Try it for yourself by filling in the words in parentheses with your own choices and see! (don't look at the original text while you write your own in case it influences your own creative process!)

template:

(Place) in (City) in (State/Country) is a (noun), a (noun), a (adjective + noun), a (2-word noun),  a (noun), a (noun),  a (noun), a (noun). (Place) is the (past tense verb) and (past tense verb), (noun) and (noun) and (noun) and (2-word noun), (adjective + noun) and (adjective + noun)  and (2-word noun), (noun) of (noun expressing materials the previous noun is made of), (noun), (noun) and (noun), and (2 adjectives + noun), and (noun) and (noun)…