Welcome to Conspicuous Force

The Robert Louis Stevenson quotation above is the premise for this blog. 

Every writer I know began by imitating a favorite story. As we mature, we gain self-confidence, exploring personal themes and developing unique styles. We feel embarrassed by our juvenilia, and sometimes even by the once-beloved authors who inspired it.

Nevertheless, I can't imagine an artist so proficient that he or she has nothing to learn from others. And one of the best ways to learn - if not the best - is imitation, just as athletes study other athletes, and actors, other actors.

When I was a college sophomore, long before entertaining dreams of being a writer, I was so enamored of Faulkner's The Unvanquished, I copied an entire scene - when Granny washes Ringo's his mouth out with soap - replacing word for word to create a science-fiction version. Ringo became Ognir, Granny, the Agrynn, "cogitate" for think, "ambulate" for walk, etcetera. 

Frankly, the result was unreadable; nevertheless, it taught me worlds about Faulkner's writing.

For years, I forgot about my experiment until as a teacher, I came across the concept of "mentor sentences," having students analyze exemplary writing and create new work using it as a model.

A popular mentor sentence is from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol, and age.

There's a lot to unpack in this little gem. Parallelism, of course; the past participle "cooked" helping isolate a very particular smell; the brand name Lysol characterizing a certain era and lifestyle; and "age," which seems a non sequitur until we think about it. 

The next step is modeling a new sentence as faithfully as possible on Angelou's, without copying it.

Her green bean casserole tasted like canned soup, Velveeta, and 1957.

Admittedly, it doesn't hold a candle to the original, but how much even this short example can teach us, and what a wonderful opportunity it offers to refresh our sentence structure and word choice and break out of the sort of creative ruts we all fall into.

I've since retired from teaching, but for my own self-instruction, I've moved beyond mentor sentences into mentor passages. 

Admittedly, my results are often awkward and ill-fitting. Writing from a model is a little like putting someone else's overcoat on, or, more accurately, putting someone else's overcoat on a horse. Rarely if ever do I get something that I can use "as is," but always, always, always I learn something about my craft from such sedulous imitation. Even better, I see overlooked potentialities in the project I'm working on. 

This blog will share my process.

For two months, I'll focus on selected excerpts from a single author - beginning in April with Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again. The first month, I'll do a close reading, analyzing sentence by sentence to discover as much as I can about the author's choices. The  second month, I'll write a passage of my own modeled on the original.

My hope is that not only will you read this blog, but contribute.  As we follow in the keystrokes of some truly amazing writers, I invite you to share what you've created and discovered.

Do you have a favorite book or author who influenced your writing? Why not tell me about it in the comments?