Track Changes

“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.” 
—Shel Silverstein

There seems to be a long tradition of writers copying the lines of other writers – literally typing out paragraphs – to understand how they work. How the story was told. How they styled it out. It comes up enough for me to think it ms a legitimate technique.

Didion copying out Hemingway.

“I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time.”

Bret Easton Ellis copying out Didion.

“I had been working on a novel, and I realized, This is how I want to sound. I can’t copy her stuff—she’s too good a writer—but I did with Didion what she did with Hemingway: I sat and typed up paragraph after paragraph of her work in order to figure out how she did it. A writer only needs one or two influences, and I had mine.”

Here’s Nicholson Baker, with his advice to writers:

Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.

But if you can’t remember all that just remember this: