Whenever there’s a lull in the party conversation and you bring up the craft of writing1, someone usually brings up stealing. As in stealing tricks and techniques from other writers in order to make your own work better.
This isn’t controversial, of course; all writers borrow from each other to some extent. There’s one aspect of this sort of literary theft that I’m particularly good at2, and it’s something I think more writers should work at: Mimicry.
Stops Copies Me
Back in college, I was once accused of plagiarism by a professor when one of my papers read a little too sophisticated; my professor didn’t bother checking, he just assumed no normal 19-year old kid would write those sentences3. And he wasn’t wrong, as I was definitely not normal at all.
But it wasn’t plagiarism, it was my innate ability to absorb writing style and regurgitate it in my own work4. It’s something I do almost unconsciously, and I do it to this day. I’d been reading a lot of dry, erudite works of literary criticism, and I just started writing in the same style.
Today this happens mainly in the monthly short stories I write. If I’m reading a book with a distinct style or technique, it will always bleed into the short story I’m working on. Sometimes this is overt. Sometimes I’m purposefully using a style from something I’m reading or have recently read — sometimes, in other words, the whole point of the story that month is to try on another writer for size. Sometimes it just sort of happens, sometimes even in the middle of the story. It will start off as a run-of-the-mill caper story, and suddenly I’m riffing on an omniscient second-person dream sequence5.
This differs from the usual advice to steal little and steal big because it’s more diffuse, less concrete. It’s not about stealing an idea or a concrete approach, but rather trying on another writer’s whole deal, trying to reverse-engineer another writer’s whole process.
More writers should try mimicry as an exercise, I think. It’s like breaking into someone’s house and walking around for a few days. You wear their pajamas, eat their food, delete stuff from their DVR. Maybe it’s not how you’re going to live the rest of your life, but you see things from a new perspective, and you pick up little tricks of the trade.
Of course, with literary mimicry there’s less chance of expulsion and arrest than with other forms of theft, which means you get the thrill of the crime without the consequences, thus obeying the Beretta Theme Song Rule6.
- Trust me, every party hits a point where talking about the craft of writing is your *best* conversational gambit.
- The other things I’m good at stealing are mostly fashion-based.
- That level of laziness means that this professor was basically what I would be like if I’d become a professor, which made me have some sympathy for them.
- Plagiarism requires work. Mimicking another writer is *easy*.
- Yes, the entire novel written in the second person is still on the bucket list, you think, grimacing.
- AKA ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,’ you Philistines. Keep your eye on the sparrow indeed.