Fully Intentional Copying

When I did writing in University we did this, but not exactly copying.

I'll try to show you what I mean...

So as an writing exercise we would need to take a passage from a novel (I'm in my third grade classroom right now... don't worry, school hasn't started yet) so all I have on hand is Charlotte's Web:

When the children grew tired of swinging, they went down toward the pasture and picked wild raspberries and ate them. Their tongues turned from purple to red. Fern bit into a raspberry that had a bad-tasting bug inside it, and got discouraged. Avery found an empty candy box and put his frog in it. The frog seemed tired after his morning in the swing. The children walked slowly up towards the barn. They, too, were tired and hardly had energy enough to walk.

"Let's build a tree house," suggested Avery. "I want to live in a tree with my frog."


Then what we would do was substitute our own material, but with the same sort of structure as the the novel passage:

Andy and Mona grew tired of Jacob's incessant nattering, they rolled their eyes and turned their attention to the faded pages in the worn text. Their eyes darted from page to page. Andy couldn't make heads or tales of the strange lettering, and felt discouraged. Mona found a chunk of text that was missing entirely and pointed it out to Andy. Jacob appeared to finally tire of repeating himself and stopped his groaning. Andy and Mona leaned back in their seats. They, too, were tired and hardly had energy enough to read.

"Let's go to the fountain," suggested Mona. "I need to splash some cold water on my eyes if I'm going to stay up all night like this."

So, while I may never use that passage in my story, what this exercise does do is helps force me to practice different sorts of sentence structures. Often times new writers get entrenched in sentence structure that feels comfortable to them and can sound very repetitive to a reader. This activity helps writers to play around with the sounds and cadence of different types of sentences. It also helps to play around with different ways of framing dialogue, different ways of using description... all sorts of good practice.

 

For my nano project I'm copying a few events from a favorite book of mine (Moominland Midwinter). I won't be rewriting the scenes themselves, but I'll copy the ideas and the concepts closely enough that someone who knows the story will be able to recognize them.

 

I've done it. Only one book in entirety (Martian Chronicles), but I've passages from others.

I have found there is a benefit to the physical act of writing the words (I write it out on paper). There's some educational kinesiology research behind it, but this really falls under the heading of do what works for you.

I sometimes re-read a book not for pleasure but for instruction. For example, I loved Lord Jim, but it's a narrative rat's nest. Why did I like it? So I read it again not as a reader but as a writer. And when I got to passages I really liked, such as the point where Jim walks into the story, I stop and write out the scene. Another one is to take dialogue I love and write that out.

Whatever the research says about muscle learning, one thing I noticed is that writing it out by hand forces me to read really slowly. I have to focus most of my attention on the words themselves. It makes me notice in phrases rather than in whole scenes. I notice the rhythm of the sentences, the sound of the words.

I can't keep that up for long. A paragraph or two, a page or two at most. Just enough to hear the author at work.

YMMV

 

Those that have followed me in the Showcase know about my derivative stories.

I have done stories like Halley Wolffer and the Alchemy Crystal, Sunset and Violet Riding Hood. They are pretty similar to the original material (Harry Potter, Twilight and the Red Riding Hood movie, respectively), but they are not copies scene by scene. They are all my own scenes, my own twists, my own characters and my own sparks, which results in quite original creations.

This kind of thing can help a lot with exercising your own creativity and imagination, it's really great.

Now, if what you want is to improve your writing and narrative abilities I think that the best idea is to read many books from various authors with different styles. Each of them will influence and teach you something along the way, but in the end what you have to do is to develop a writing style and a narrative voice of your own.

That Copycat thing could cause you to become way too influenced by somebody, and also it seems tedious, time-consuming and a little dishonest at least from my point of view. In case I found out that someone is re-writing one of my books scene by scene but changing details, I would tell them: You leave my work alone!

Writing Fanfictions is a better idea.

 

Interesting timing, as I was thinking about this myself yesterday. I can see the value in doing it to learn techniques for pacing, creating mood, writing description and so on - the technical means of achieving storytelling goals. But I would expect it to have diminishing returns after a certain amount has been written from any given work or author. I think I'll attempt it myself and see how helpful it is; there are a few books I already have in mind to practice with.

I have written out my own work longhand as an editing exercise before. It was a short story and I found that writing it longhand forced me to consider my word choices, sentence structure, to notice repetition of words that might stand out, and so on. So it would be logical that doing the same with someone else's work would give me similar insights.

I think the way I would go about it would be to get an A4 notebook, draw a line down the middle of the page, and use the left half the page to transcribe the book or passage and the right half to make notes about what I've learned, what I like or dislike, how the structure or word choice serves to improve the reader's understanding of character, etc. Once November is over I'll give it a go.

 

Ooh, I like the idea of the two columns. Will have to try that.

No less a person than Benjamin Franklin recommends the copying exercise. You're right about diminishing returns, but I hold it's worth doing, especially if it's focused--this scene for its descriptions, that one for dialog, another for a fight scene, and so on. But not the same kind a dozen times!

 

Dragon, that's typically when I do it, during writers block. If I'm staring at a blank page and not quite sure how to start a scene I may open up a novel and start with the same way that author started... maybe a bit of dialogue, maybe a thought, maybe a description... but using my own content. Often it gets edited out, but for me it is worth it's weight in gold for simply just getting started.