Category Archives: creative writing

Writing Exercise: Mimicry, Part 2

Posted on by

My last post was an introduction to the use of mimicry in writing as a tool for developing a writer’s voice. In this second half of the posted exercise, we’re going to try our hands at being copycats…for the sake of art.

If you’ve never done an imitation writing exercise before, granting yourself permission to be a hack may prove to be the first challenge. That fear of God that rises inside of a writer in near brushes with plagiarism is real—it serves the practical purposes of safeguarding work and respecting territory—and it can get in the way of allowing yourself the freedom to experiment. So, repeat with me: “I’m going to copy. I’m going to steal from talented writers.” You’re also not going to pass off a floundering word substitution exercise as a submission for The Atlantic (or for a class, unless your professor understands and agrees with your method!), so rest assured that you’re just flexing some underused muscles and testing your limits for the purposes of an exercise.

There are multiple approaches to imitation or mimicry exercises—you can substitute clauses while retaining punctuation, you can swap out words, and some writers even find value in transcribing text word-for-word to get a feel for the motion and rhythm of the original work. I’m going to select a passage and do my best to adhere to a rough sentence structure and theme. Feel free to play along with this passage or one of your own choosing.

  1. I’m giving myself a real humdinger of a complex and beautiful passage from Olga Grushin’s novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov:

“And slowly, as more recollections claimed him, all the accidentally intercepted glances and bitten lips and bright, insincere intonations slid into place, all the uncertainties were made certain, all the blank spots colored—and by the time Belkin turned to him with a new glass of colorless tea, he finally knew the truth, and his whole young past with Nina, with its sleepless rambles through the city, its flights of happiness, its ecstatic dreams, shifted, changed in time, became dimmer, sadder, more transparent, and at the same time more real” (2005).

Seriously. Isn’t that an incredible sentence?

  1. My second step is to identify the highlights of the passage, and I encourage you to do the same for a passage that you’ve selected. Here’s what I love about the excerpt from above and its author: Grushin is a pro at dragging the reader through her characters’ critical emotional crossroads, especially the ones where the unexpected barrels through and blindsides characters. Here, the anxiety is mounting as the main character of the novel sorts through memories of his wife and best friend, each recollection being tinted with a new sense of loss and betrayal in light of a freshly uncovered, disturbing truth about an enduring, clandestine love. The passage has a dizzying motion to it due to the movement from present to past to present to past to present, all while memories and reality are shifting. In the context of the story, the dizziness mirrors the physical and mental state of the unsteady main character, Sukhanov.
  1. Now for the hard part. Mimicking. Here’s my very basic shot at it (try your own, as well!):

Steadily, with a stream of regrets flooding her, all the paths she could’ve walked and canvases left untouched became rising, swift waters, all the wasted moments were droplets, all her talents were wind—and by the time Anna looked to her reflection, a pallid wash crossed with fine, worn tributaries, she realized that her youth, with its tired excuses, its manic spurts of partial paintings, its sullen dry spells, was lost, starkly barren, a fossilized, unchangeable history of inertia.

My aim for the exercise was to get a feel for Grushin’s structure, so I copied that as best as I could. I also wanted to fluctuate between past and present and stick with the themes of discovery and loss. The outcome is vastly different from anything that I would ordinarily write, and it’s refreshing and challenging to grapple with a complex structure when I gravitate toward a more straightforward, conversational style. What did I learn? This type of structure is really effective for engaging a reader in something that is typically boring to witness in real life: picturing a person untangling thoughts. The structure allows you to both see the person and experience revelations with that person. That’s one of the greatest beauties of writing, isn’t it?

I encourage you to test out a new style to see what can be learned and to push yourself out of the comfort zone. The process might bring about new themes for your work as well as adding variety to tired sentence structures, and it will certainly add dimension to your voice.

Writing Exercise: Mimicry, Part I

Posted on by

A writer’s voice is an ever-changing product of practice and exposure to others’ work. Much in the same way that we carry with us a gesture, a mannerism, a charm from each person who has influenced us in life, writers absorb structures, themes, cadences, and lyricism from authors. These essential adoptions in daily reading and writing practices add dimension to the timbre of writers’ voices and invite us to revisit classics and seek out new authors as part of our growth.

For novice writers, developing a voice is a critical challenge; some novices shift rapidly through styles and avoid cultivating a unique and mature voice while others stick with what they know and remain underdeveloped, firmly situated in a comfort zone. It can be hard for young poets, for example, to land confidently in a new verse structure. (If couplets are your cup of tea, why switch and brew up misery?) And it can be easy to write off a style without trying it out. Some fit like gloves while others seem to be shoes on the wrong feet. Growth. It’s a necessary, painful, and experimental stretch that can be eased through intentional development of voice. Enter the art of mimicry. Tell us all about it, T.S. Eliot:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. (“The Sacred Wood,” 1921)

According to Eliot, it isn’t so much about whether or not a writer will take from the masters (that’s a given, and you’re likely doing it to a degree without noticing); his test of a writer’s worth hinges on the quality and uniqueness of the resulting work. It takes exposure to great work and experience to develop into the “good poet,” and a writing practice that centers on absorption can take writers from the immature imitator to the master with a unique voice.

The first step of absorbing great work is analysis. All writers benefit from analyzing the work of influential authors—it doesn’t matter if you’re a poet looking to a novelist or a journalist looking to a screenwriter. Here’s an exercise to encourage you to seek out those who inspire you, and then I hope you’ll take some time to reflect on their work.

  • Identify a favorite author and one work from that author.
  • Identify what appeals to you about the author’s writing. Theme? Sentence structure? Narrative arc? Character development? Explore what is appealing about the handling of the identified elements.
  • Identify what doesn’t appeal to you or something that rings untrue in the work. What’s going on in the work at those turns?

Eventually, you’ll want to identify a sentence or paragraph that is particularly striking to you. Bookmark that page! We’re going to need that excerpt for the exercise that will be in my next post, “Writing Exercise: Mimicry, Part II.”

Featured Resources: Writer’s Block

Posted on by

Comedian Steve Martin once said, “Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” We know he was joking (isn’t Steve Martin always joking?) because anyone who has written as many books, magazine pieces, and plays as he has cannot have avoided writer’s block.

What is writer’s block? (Psych students, hold off—it’s not in the DSM.) Feel free to self-diagnose. Can’t figure out how to get started? Do you repeatedly write a line and then delete it in disgust? Have you found yourself in the middle of a paper without any idea of what you’re doing there? Sure, you have writer’s block! Here are some resources to help.

Overcoming Writer’s Block: This Writing Center handout suggests that maybe, if you’re stuck, you need to read your sources a bit more carefully, do some prewriting to develop your purpose and strategy, or work with a consultant in the Writing Center.

How to Crush Writer’s Block: This episode of Austin’s own Two Guys on Your Head podcast investigates the psychological and emotional reasons why writers get stuck and how they can get unstuck.

And finally, the Writer’s Block Instant Cure:

Follow any of this advice and you’ll be writing fluently again in no time. Happy writing!

Campus Publications at St. Edward’s University

Posted on by

Do you want to publish your art or writing? Do you enjoy reading the work of others and talking about writing? Do your friends always ask you to help proofread their papers? Getting involved in a campus publication is a great way to get some résumé-building experience with writing, editing, design, publishing, and even marketing and event planning.

Following is a list of campus publications at St. Edward’s, with links for more information. Note that each publication has different guidelines, policies, schedules, and needs, and most are staffed by students and faculty who juggle many responsibilities. If you want to get involved, be sure to read the information on the publication’s website, if it has one, and be respectful and professional when emailing publication staff. (Here are Five Tips for Better Email.)

  • Arete, published annually in print, is the university’s academic journal. Submission guidelines are on the web.
  • Cabra is a student-run fashion magazine on the web. For contact information, see the Masthead section of the website.
  • Hilltop Views is the campus newspaper, which publishes in print and online. To learn how to get involved, see the Contact Us and Submission links at the bottom of the website.
  • J-Source: A St. Edward’s Undergraduate Research Journal is the faculty-edited journal of SOURCE (Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression), an annual event. For more information, contact Dr. Victoria Hill.
  • New Literati is an arts and literary journal published online and in print. See the journal’s website for contact and submission information.
  • Pangaea: Global Connections  is an online journal publishing student perspectives on global issues and processes. For more information, contact Charles R. Porter, Jr., MLA.
  • The Sorin Oak Review, published annually in print, is an established arts and literary journal at St. Edward’s. Visit the website for contact and submission information.

If you have information to add to this list, please email us at writingcenter@stedwards.edu.

How to Be a Scholar in a Digital Environment

Posted on by

You find the article in an online database but print it out for highlighting. You show up to class with a laptop (dead battery, no charger) and a pen (no paper). You’re reading an ebook, but your style guide is full of advice for citing print books. It’s not just you—today’s reading and writing environment is beautiful mess, a hybrid of the print and the digital.

This hybrid environment can leave all of us writers and researchers—students and professionals alike—confused about how to get started, keep track of research and organize a project, facilitate focus amid constant distractions and massive amounts of text and information, and iterate drafts. But entrepreneurial readers and writers can take advantage of this environment by developing unique combinations of strategies and methods that leverage their strengths and make sense for their projects.

With our pals in the Munday Library, we’ve developed the following big-picture sampler, with links to many resources on campus and online, of strategies that readers and writers might pull from as they develop unique processes.

If the embed isn’t working for you, download the PDF file.

Need help developing a unique process for your project? Contact the library or Writing Center services.

Writers on Writing on YouTube

Posted on by

Need inspiration for your writing weekend? Here’s our Youtube playlist of writers talking about writing:

Digital Tools for Reading and Writing

Posted on by

""Reading articles online doesn’t mean that you can’t write on them, and a paperless workflow doesn’t mean that you can’t map out your ideas visually. Here is the OWL’s collection of the best digital tools for reading, annotation, organizing, and writing.

Have a tool to share? Email us at owl@stedwards.edu!

Good Reads on Writing: Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

Posted on by

Serious about developing your writing skills? In the Good Reads on Writing series, we’ll suggest some books and articles in which writers give insider tips, complain about their writing problems, and tell stories about how they got from idea or assignment to published work.  

If you’re in a certain mood, you might find the title Good Prose (find it at the Austin Public Library) to be a reminder that most of the writing we do is not going to be great, and that even our best efforts might result in something that’s merely good enough. But it’s also a reminder that writing that good-enough stuff is hard work, real work. Authors Tracy Kidder, a writer, and Richard Todd, his editor for many years at the Atlantic, make no secrets of the many drafts tossed in the wastebasket during the process of crafting articles and books. Over the four decades that Todd and Kidder worked together, they’ve come up with lots of golden advice. Here are a few nuggets from the book:

  • There are two kinds of rewriting: tinkering with words and sentences, and actually writing the thing again.
  • Write a first draft as quickly as possible. Then you won’t feel so bad about yourself when you have to scrap the whole thing.
  • Be wary of using voices that try to nuzzle up too close to the reader.
  • Sometimes you must sacrifice beloved parts for the survival of the whole.
  • Don’t mess with chronology unless you have an extremely good reason to do so.
  • “Something is always wrong with a draft.”
  • “All prose responds to work.”

 

The book itself exemplifies clarity we should all strive for in writing. It’s a product of editorial synthesis, the result of collaboration between a writer and an editor who are equally relentless. Few writers have this relationship, but if you happen into one, by all means, don’t let it go.