For me, I want to study Cormac MacCarthy's description, Clive Barker's detail, Elmore Leonard's dialogue, Chandler's delivery. I feel like putting them together would create taut, tight contrast against beautiful description.
I came here from your blog post about the question "Is it too late to start writing?". At the end of it you punched me in the face with the hard truth: people like me tend to ask this question because of insecurity and fear to try to write, it's something very human being afraid of new endeavours, but we need to accept the fact that questions like that reflect some unspoken excuses that we have to get rid of. What's funny is that I'm 23, wtf! Thank you for that post, it was necessary. Ps: I enjoy your video about the copywork technique, I was already doing it but wasn't conscious of it, I just liked to write down fragments of my favorite readings and stretched them long enough and always ended up copying the whole thing haha. *Ps 2. Sorry for my English
Thanks for coming over, Stefan! I'm so glad you got some value out of that post :) Channel those human fears into your writing!! 23 is still so young!! George R. R. Martin didn't hit it big with his writing until his 60s ;)
I read about this in the Boron Letters, trying to learn about how to hone my writing, and I didn’t quite understand the reasoning. When you connected it to practicing scales and slowing down phrases in music, it really clicked, since I was a band kid in high school/college. Thanks for all that you do!
I have a friend who writes great poetry and he sat down an entire summer to copywrite the Norse Eddas. I thought it was because of dedication, but I can see how clever he was by doing so.
I felt very inspired by this: I’m going to try Hemingway, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace. Three of my favorites. I’ll be copying The Broom in the System, The Sun Also Rises, and the Metamorphosis. I think it’ll be interesting to see how they blend together
It’s really cool you learned copywork through copywriting, most resources mentioning copywork, well second most(first being homeschooled) is copywriting.
Love this - as I do all your videos. Have been published a few times, and teach Creative Writing courses, also play guitar - but never once has it struck me about practice. Your analogy of a musician practicing scales and a writer copying from one of the greats completely blew my mind. I'm going for my three favourites: Dickens, Hemingway and Walt Whitman. Thank you for everything you do, mate. It is truly appreciated : )
I started doing this a month ago. So far I’ve used Faulkner, Flannery O Connor, Dostoyevsky, and Cormac McCarthy. For todays copy work, I might do Don Delillo.
This a great exercise. It reminds me of the classical writing rhetoric curriculum in antiquity (look up for progymnasmata). There the students have exercises in which they copy the content of work in their style and also write different content in the style of a certain author.
I’ve loved your blog. And I’ve known about copywork for a while too. Great to see your doing videos, and it’s nice to see all the copywork you’ve done! So glad there’s more exposure for copywork as a tool for adults.
@@catherineknight317 Hi Catherine :) I would recommend a volume edited by Harold Bloom called 'Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages'. The poems are divided up by season, and there are some really lovely, fun ones in there! :) The poems are short, child-friendly, and perfect for memorisation.
@@BenjaminMcEvoy wow that's extremely helpful!! Thank you! My son is currently memorizing Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and passages from A Midsummer Night's dream... he loves it... an advantage of homeschooling! But i'm definitely wanting to start some copywork!
Interesting. I've been doing this with LOTR but it's good that you pointed out memorizing longer passages. I've almost subconsciously noticed that the more words I copy at a time, the more solid it feels. I'll start writing one sentence now.
Great video - makes me want to try it out - I would probably choose Margaret Atwood , Sebastian Fitzek probably also Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
George R R Martin, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, J S Emuakpor, Kira Lees, Hayley Stone, A C Wise, Kent Nerburn, Harold Lamb, Shaila Abdullah, and Fyodor Dostoevsky
I've started doing this with Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Afterwards I want to move onto Dostoevsky and Dumas. I plan to write about a character in dreary Dostoevsky-like circumstances that goes on a Dumas type of adventure. It seems like a fun/interesting juxtaposition.
Very nice! Great line up: Knut Hamsun, Dostoyevsky, and Dumas - what a nice crossbreed of narrative styles. A Dostyevskian character in Dumas’ world - I love that!
I just have to jump in on this slightly dated comment: Daniel i love that mix / juxtaposition.. i still have to read Hamsun (on my shelf) but the combo of the other two...sounds like a blast! best of luck🤩 👍
Currently I've been doing Ray Bradbury. He was greatly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, L. Frank Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as the science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. So, hopefully, as a fringe benefit I'll cannibalize them as well. I'm doing the shorter stories of The Martian Chronicles (1950) in their entirety, key moments from Fahrenheit 451 (1953) that seem to stand out as I read through it, and shorter chapters from Dandelion Wine (1957). I know I really should be focusing on his short stories, for which he's primarily known, as opposed to his novels but it's what I have in front of me right now. I'm also doing Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by R.L. Stevenson. I'm interested in trying something similar with comic book writing. Perhaps by reading a comic and then writing a script based off that. Oh! I could do that with films as well. Damn.
Nice one, James. I picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs because Bradbury spoke so lovingly about him. John Carter, Warlord of Mars, and Tarzan - such wonderful stories. Great idea to do it with comics too! You might like to check out Bradbury's favourite comic strip, Buck Rogers. I personally like anything by Jeff Lemire (Black Hammer, Gideon Falls, Trillium). I must say I've been meaning to use Stevenson myself - such a clean writer. A joy to learn from! Thanks for the great comment!
Henry Miller was fired from the Paris Tribune where he worked third shift with his friend Alfred Perles, for getting caught copying out The Antichrist by Nietzsche on his typewriter. Another thing that really got me about Miller, who's work I adore, is that his style is not quite the surrendered original HM voice which I had thought it was. Tropic of Cancer is not quite in his full running style. I did not realize how unoriginal it was until I read Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine. Miller scrapped the penultimate version of Tropic of Cancer having read Journey to the End of the Night and rewrote it and then gave it to his publisher.
I have a question! Say if you copy a short story and you do one paragraph everyday. Do you rewrite the previous paragraphs and rewrite the whole story after the end or just move on till the end and leave? Or just do different paragraphs from different books everyday?
A little bit of everything - see what works for you :) copy out lines you love several times, or just pick up from where you left off, or do a patchwork approach - all valuable! Happy writing, Dillon!
I think I will start copying Dostoyevsky to capture elements of internal torment/suffering. I respect Douglas Coupland’s ability to capture the essence of modernity. I love his books Hey Nostradamus and Life After God. Life After God is an incredible book filled with aphorisms that I think you should check out if you haven’t already.
also it seems that a lot of great writers are translators, Jorge Luis Borges, julio cortázar, Armando Uribe, ungaretti, boudelaire are (i believe, i could be wrong with some of them lol) examples of that, so i guess i will start translating some dante or Leopardi to see if i get some of them into my writing, and also improve my language skills, my italian and spanish are weak (my English too lol)
Another great exercise is to punch up sentences from writers you admire. Copy something down and simply try to imrpove it. Cut needless words and use vivid verbs and nouns. For example: The man ate fruit. Could become: The bounty hunter sucked each apple slice right off his knife.
Joan Didion would copy Hemingway's sentences !! So great to learn about Stevenson and Blake. Actually Rembrandt wanted to be Rubens!!! The power of influences. Lie cheat and steal🤣 Wonderful advice, thank you for the tips!!
Thank you. This is adjacent to thoughts I've had about learning how to study and analyze great works. I'm going to start with Diane Setterfield. I have a copy of The Thirteenth Tale. It'll be fun. I also like what @AProbablyPostman said. I'm going for the 10 minutes each morning routine.
Nice video! Very educative. I wonder if doing copywork of translated works would be effective at absorbing an author's voice. Being a non-native English speaker, I would enjoy doing Hemingway's translated short stories, but I don't know to what extent would I be assimilating the translator's style instead.
Thank you, Bruno! What language are you reading Hemingway in translation? I've thought that myself when it comes to Russian writers. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translators are close to the original, but surely I wouldn't be absorbing Tolstoy's voice himself.. Having said that, it seems as though you have perfect English. Why not copy Hemingway in the original? :)
@@BenjaminMcEvoy Thank you :) I would indeed prefer copying Hemingway in the original. But, since I write fiction in Portuguese, I guess doing copywork in English would be equivalent to practicing guitar while trying to learn, say, ukulele. There might be some transfer in the learning process, but in many respects (word choice, for instance) it would be an entirely different exercise. On the other hand, copying translated works might not be very effective as far as absorbing an author's voice is concerned. Having said that, the Bible, the Odyssey and some other ancient classics we read today are all translations...
@@brunoteixeira9770 Are you Brazilian? I also write fiction in Portuguese. Right now I'm studying Stephen King's writings. The translations are great and certainly emulate part of your style. But they're different languages with different rhythms and sounds, and I get frustrated trying to learn it. I'm relatively new at this. Any tips?
@@brunoteixeira9770 I love that analogy. And really astute observation. Apart from Shakespeare, I know I haven't personally read much that isn't a translation recently. And there is certainly such a huge degree of difference between translators - as is the case with the Bible and Homer, Dante and Cervantes, Proust and Tolstoy.
Very interesting blog, Ben. I’ve been thinking along those lines for a while, but you give me the kick to do it. I’ll go with Camus, naturellement. And I’ll add Dostoevsky and Auster. Those three will more than fill up my cup.
I’m trying do the same with Dickens, Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tolstoy and Victor Hugo, trying to blend all of them into my own voice. Wish me luck 🍀
In addition to the 'Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages' I mentioned in another comment, I think follow his interests. If he likes adventure stories, Robert Louis Stevenson has Treasure Island and Kidnapped (might be a bit of a challenge though). There's The Swiss Family Robinson, and the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs like Tarzan and Warlord of Mars. For something more current and YA-style, the Darren Shan vampire series is a lot of fun, as is Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events :)
Just my uninformed opinion, but I would guess if you spend equivalent time, whatever your normal method of writing should probably be good. At first, I was thinking hand writing might be best, and in some ways that’s probably the case. But I use voice to text a lot and conceivably if you spend the same amount of time doing that you’re going to be copying a lot more material so that might have benefits too.
Hemingway....without a doubt A Farewell to Arms had some of the best and simplest prose ever. That is the style that fits me - straight and to the point and using simple words.
I'm going to start with Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I love the voicing of that book. His insane transitions between poetic voice to colloquial are blunt and shocking, in a good way. Though I wouldn't structure a novel like him, I admire the power and flexibility of his voice.
Awesome choice, Joshua! I love Kerouac's On the Road. His writing style is superb :) I love how you've described it - 'insane transitions between poetic voice to colloquial'. Perfectly put!
Great idea! That is what Hunter S Thompson did. And that's what you, the watcher of this video, should do too. Since I'm a writer and I am copying other writers to improve my writing, my suggestion is to copy Great brilliant writers and do it word-for-word front to back over and over. You will improve what Stephen King calls your tools: Vocabulary Grammar Style. It'll help you clean off the rust like Stephen says in On Writing. Here are some great authors you need to copy and improve your tools. Warning! Some of these authors are strict about plagiarism. So my suggestion is to throw the copies away. Here we go: Harlan Ellison C. S. Lewis Gillian Flynn E. T. A. Hoffmann H. P. Lovecraft Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Remember: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. -Oscar Wilde
