Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Why You Should Copy Others by Joe Bunting

As well as 15 Habits of Great Writers, I've been practicing my writing with a group of people on Joe Bunting's blog The Write Practice. Today we learned about copying the style of other writers to enhance our own by actually copying text from authors we like.

http://thewritepractice.com/why-you-should-copy-other-writers/

I love this exercise. Firstly, I learned I need to cut my nails because I made so many typos. But that's beside the point. I wrote an excerpt from Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver. Maggie has a beautifully simple and poetic voice. I noticed in her dialogue she uses basic text like, she said, he asked...instead of something more elaborate like, she sighed or he groaned. I think I do that a lot in my writing and I've heard AEs don't really care for that too much. Any thoughts?

Another participant suggested using sentences from other authors and rewriting them in the same structure but with different words. Sounds interesting. Good practice.

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