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voxceleste · 6 days ago

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Hihi! This is a different anon but I really loved your response to the anon’s question about writing! So thorough and helpful! Do you mind suggesting maybe like a specific page from seven different books that you’d suggest for the imitating-writing-style exercise? Like from any authors that you personally find their styles very arresting or potentially useful for this exercise? If there is a charity that you especially like, I promise to donate 50 USD to it as a thank you!

hi!

if you do an exercise like this, i'd recommend these steps to get the most out of it:

transcribe the passage by hand in a notebook

use a different coloured pen to annotate the passage transcription, circling or underlining particular things that stand out to you, as well as writing notes below or in the margins

read the passage out loud

here are some starting questions you could ask yourself when reading and rereading a passage:

think about sentence length and how rhythm is used within a paragraph, as well as within a sentence

is there repetition? alliteration?

how "close" are we to the perspective character? can you identify a perspective character within the excerpt? are we learning things about the world at large outside of one person's consciousness or does the narrator keep us tightly bound to that character's experience? which writing techniques support them in doing this?

what sorts of words are used? are there words you don't recognize? would you describe the passage as straightforward to understand, or challenging? do you have to read it multiple times to understand what's going on? if so, what makes that the case, and what does it do for your experience as a reader to have to work for the meaning? (this isn't about value judgements, just thinking about the how.)

how are the sentences structured? is the author generous or sparing with punctuation? are there many or few clauses? (it's worthwhile to read about clauses and sentence-level grammar, if you're not familiar with thinking about language this way)

what is the tone--dark, humorous, matter-of-fact? would you characterize the style of writing as formal, informal, somewhere in between? does the style of writing evoke a certain accent or region? the answers to these questions often involve diction, which is the cumulative effect of the many decisions an author makes about word choice.

how is time treated? what is the tense? does this passage refer to a specific moment in time, or are we operating in a sweeping, narratorial, generalized way? are we moving from point to point rapidly, and how does the author signify these shifts if so? (the written word allows us to be much more flexible with the treatment of time and consciousness than audiovisual media does. we don't need to "cut" between scenes or moments in a hard way, like a movie would, if a more graceful shift would also do the job.)

once you've thought about some of these questions, you will have a better sense of how an author achieves the total effect that we refer to as their "voice" or "style." pinpointing the techniques they use will allow you to play around with using them yourself.

i also recommend using a simple writing prompt generator if you do an "imitating someone's style" exercise, and keep your attempts to a page or two. don't try and produce something good or polished. this is the equivalent of an artist doing practice sketches; you're just doing it for its own sake, and you're certainly not going to be as good at imitating an author on the first try as the author is at being themself, so try to avoid being harsh on yourself. you're just learning.

i can suggest some works i think might be good jumping-off points, but this exercise would work best with books you come across on your own that spark a sense of envy or curiosity in you--there's a lot of personal taste involved, and there's not much use in doing a master study, as it were, of work that doesn't interest you.

just to give you a sense of what you might be looking for out of comparative study, i picked out seven memorable opening passages from books i had in reaching range of my desk. they should be comprehensible without context since they're all page 1s, and hopefully have enough diversity among them that you know what kinds of things you might be looking for.

if anyone who finds this post useful has any funds available to spare for Heba's family as they try to stabilize their lives, I would appreciate it very much:

novel excerpts:

1956. The air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theater smells of flowery pomade, sugary chocolates, cigarette smoke, and sweat. All That Heaven Allows is playing in Cinemascope and Technicolor. Starring Jane Wyman as the rich widow, Rock Hudson as the handsome young gardener, and Agnes Moorehead as Jane's faithful friend, the movie also features the unsung starlet Gloria Talbott as Jane's spoiled teenage daughter, a feisty brunette with catlike features and an innocent ponytail.

Rock Hudson's rustic gardener's cottage stands next to a frozen lake. The sky is a garish baby-blue, the clouds are ethereal wads of fluffy white cotton. In this perfect picture-book American tableau, plaid hunting jackets, roaring cellophane fires, smoking chimneys, and stark winter forests of skeletal trees provide costume and setting for Hollywood's version of a typical rural American Christmas. Huddled with our chaperone Lorenza, my cousin Pucha Gonzaga and I sit enthralled in the upper section of the balcony in Manila's "Foremost! First-Run! English Movies Only!" theater, ignoring the furtive lovers stealing noisy kisses in the pitch-black darkness all around us.

Jane Wyman's soft putty face. Rock Hudson's singular, pitying expression. Flared skirts, wide cinch belts, prim white blouses, a single strand of delicate, blue-white pearls. Thick penciled eyebrows and blood-red vampire lips; the virginal, pastel-pink cashmere cardigan draped over Gloria Talbott's shoulders. Cousin Pucha and I are impressed by her brash style; we gasp at Gloria's cool indifference, the offhand way she treats her grieving mother. Her casual arrogance seems inherently American, modern, and enviable.

Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn

***

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn't left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This remark, which enjoyed a brief season as a mot, can only be understood by those who knew Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that "Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou'wester." And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest? Where had she got him from? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann's undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard's van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday's news.

Call For the Dead, John le Carré

***

Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual; for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other--other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.

A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood.

The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!

Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

***

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

***

In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

The old woman was let in by the side door down the vaulted passage by Paul's room and she was allowed a moment to peer in at him where he lay in his bed.

By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother. The old woman was a witch shadow--hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded 'round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.

"Is he not small for his age, Jessica?" the old woman asked. Her voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset.

Dune, Frank Herbert

***

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signalling a right turn he had resolved never to make. He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year's resolution.

But even as his breathing became spasmodic and his lights dimmed, Archie was aware that Cricklewood Broadway would seem a strange choice. Strange to the first person to notice his slumped figure through the windscreen, strange to the policemen who would file the report, to the local journalist called upon to write fifty words, to the next of kin who would read them. Squeezed between an almighty concrete cinema complex at one end and a giant intersection at the other, Cricklewood was no kind of place. It was not a place a man came to die. It was a place a man came in order to go other places via the A41. But Archie Jones didn't want to die in some pleasant, distant woodland, or on a cliff edge fringed with delicate heather. The way Archie saw it, country people should die in the country and city people should die in the city. Only proper. In death as he was in life and all that. It made sense that Archibald should die on this nasty urban street where he had ended up, living alone at the age of forty-seven, in a one-bedroom flat above a deserted chip shop. He wasn't the type to make elaborate plans--suicide notes and funeral instructions--he wasn't the type for anything fancy. All he asked for was a bit of silence, a bit of shush so he could concentrate. He wanted it to be perfectly quiet and still, like the inside of an empty confessional box or the moment in the brain between thought and speech. He wanted to do it before the shops opened.

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

***

The moment Fetter is born, Mother-of-Glory pins his shadow to the earth with a large brass nail and tears it from him. This is his first memory, the seed of many hours of therapy to come. It is raining. His shadow is cast upon reddish soil thick with clay that clings to Fetter as he rolls in it, unable to raise his head, saved from drowning in mud only by the fortunate angle of his landing. The arch of Mother-of-Glory's knee frames what he sees next. His shadow writhes slowly on its nail. Mother-of-Glory dips her hands in that mud to gather up the ropy shadow of his umbilical cord and throttles his severed shadow with a quick loop, pulled tight. The shadow goes to its end in silence--or if it cries out, if shadows can cry out, that sound is lost in the rain.

The next hours and years are lost to Fetter. Even this first memory is forgotten, until, as a boy already wearing thin his first decade of life, he explores the maze of his mother's house, looking for secrets, and stumbles across the lacquer box where Mother-of-Glory keeps a lock of his baby hair and the nail that tore his shadow from him. As he holds it in his hands that garrotting comes back to him, framed by the arch of his mother's knee, the shadow falling away, bloody rivulets in red mud.

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera

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